Women help women by learning from history

August 22, 2016

By Chiho Iuchi

Staff writer

While it has been said, "We learn from history that we learn nothing from history," it is useful to discover differences and commonalities among societies that vary with time and place. Haruko Nishida, president of the non-governmental organization Women Help Women (WHW), was attracted to medieval Italian history when she was a student.

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Haruko Nishida, research consultant and president of the non-governmental organization Women Help Women, at an interview with The Japan Times on Aug. 1
CHIHO IUCHI

"It was not just the Dark Ages," said Nishida, whose graduation thesis was on the open and diverse society in Sicily under the reign of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century.

Nishida noted that, unfortunately, human beings have repeated genocide throughout history. "And today, democracy is challenged," she said. But she believes in the human achievements in the past, and hopes to make society a better place by fulfilling each individual's potential.

Sense of purpose is key

Why did she study history?

"In kindergarten, I was so intense and focused on creating something in the sandbox that I didn't realize what other kids were doing, according to my mother," Nishida said. While teachers tried to discipline her, Nishida said, "I'm grateful my mother allowed me to do things at my own pace." The curious and precocious girl often went to the movies during her high school days, when her classmates had already started preparing for university entrance examinations. However, one book on her father's bookshelf opened her eyes to the history of European Renaissance.

"I wanted to know more about why the Renaissance happened and became interested in the time leading up to it; the Middle Ages," Nishida said.

Her strong interest led her to attend a lecture by renowned historian, professor Shozaburo Kimura, and it convinced her to go to the University of Tokyo to study under him.

"A sense of purpose is important. It enhanced my motivation to work hard to achieve the goal," she said. "This feeling of direction has always been the driving force in my life."

Although she once thought about an academic career, she changed her mind when she learned that there were not a few unemployed Ph.D. holders at universities. "I preferred to earn a living first."

From clerk to analyst

She started working at Japanese think tank the Research Institute of Mitsui Knowledge Industry in 1981. In those days, most Japanese workplaces did not offer women the same job opportunities as men and Nishida was shocked to realize that she was hired as a clerk — not a researcher.

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Haruko Nishida (center) meets with members of the Ocean Blue group that creates indigo-dyed products in Kesennuma, Miyagi Prefecture, in 2015. The city was among the hardest-hit in the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
WOMEN HELP WOMEN

"But I asked the company to let me and my two female colleagues attend the same training program as our male colleagues did," Nishida said. So she learned computer programing and luckily her boss was flexible enough to give her challenging tasks. Due to her efforts over five years, the company finally changed her position from clerk to research analyst in 1986 after the equal employment opportunity law was enacted in Japan in 1985.

"To my surprise, I got an increase of ¥1 million in annual salary," Nishida said.

With a stable salary, she thought she was going to be in the company until retirement. Before long, however, another question arose: Are think tanks all right?

She became frustrated by the vulnerable position of think tanks in Japan, saying "Our macroeconomic analysis or social research in the fields of telecommunications, education and regional development never seemed to be reflected in policy decisions," Nishida said.

Study in the U.S.

In 1990, she moved to the U.S. to study at the Arthur D. Little School of Management (present-day Hult International Business School) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She took a year off from her job and studied at her own expense.

ADL was an institute owned by an international management consulting firm Arthur D. Little, which was one of the Mitsui Knowledge Industry's business partners.

"It was great to attend courses given by full-time professors from the Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan, Babson, Northeastern and Boston College, who came to give lectures at the ADL," Nishida recounted. Also, the courses were attended by international students, who she could blend in with, not caring too much about each other's accented English.

After successfully earning her MBA, she decided to study further at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government with encouragement coming from a professor of development economy, which was her favorite course at the ADL.

"I was very interested in the solutions to the problems of poor countries," said Nishida, who quit her job at the Mitsui Knowledge Industry when she entered JFK in 1991.

Manager at McKinsey

After earning an MPA from JFK, she joined McKinsey & Company in 1992. She worked as a consultant for several years, and then became a research manager, which she found more palatable than working to help rich clients make more money. Until 2010, she served as North Asia research manager, in charge of Seoul and Tokyo Research and Information at McKinsey.

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Nishida (center) takes part in the annual Global Summit of Women (GSW) in Paris in June 2014.
WOMEN HELP WOMEN

"The position of manager taught me a lot about leadership, especially as a woman," said Nishida, who developed her management style based on a servant leadership model through a trial and error process.

"I believe that we need to encourage people to face the reality and trust them in doing their jobs," she pointed out. "And this was the same as with my people in Seoul to whom I spoke in English.

While she worked on various macroeconomic and industrial analytical research projects for McKinsey, she often gave external presentations on "knowledge creation and open innovation" that she has extensively researched for over 10 years with academics, including Ikujiro Nonaka, professor emeritus of Hitotsubashi University, best known for his study on knowledge management.

Her activities outside the company and personal network, including Ashoka non-profit organization and Public Resource Foundation in Japan, paved the way to her next step to work on social business. When McKinsey proposed cutbacks for R&I after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in 2008, Nishida felt the time was right to leave.

"I felt it like a voice of heaven. As I can apply all of my previous consulting business expertise to create social business projects, I thought I should move on," she said.

Women Help Women

When she served as a co-founder of the IMPACT Foundation Japan, the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on March 11, 2011. In July of the same year, the Women Help Women initiative was launched by S.J. Kim, head of South Korea's SJ Apparel and other volunteer female entrepreneurs to provide support to the women and children affected by the disasters. In response, the WHW Initiative Japan was formed by female entrepreneurs in Japan to organize support activities.

Although, it was originally a five-year business start-up program that aimed to support women in disaster-hit areas to achieve economic self-sufficiency, the initiative evolved into a non-governmental organization Women Help Women in Japan in 2014 to continue engaging in all activities related to create a women's global happiness value chain. Having been involved in the initiative, Nishida serves as the president of WHW.

These personal networks and activities were originally established through the Global Summit of Women (GSW), a business summit focusing on women's advancement in the global economy and led by American entrepreneur Irene Natividad since 1990. Since its establishment, WHW has been actively involved in trying to bring the annually rotating summit to Tokyo, which will become a reality in May 2017.

"Everything happened by accident. I've never made any plans, or drawn up any scenarios to come this far, but I feel like everything is connected for me," Nishida stated.

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After attending GSW 2016 in June in Warsaw, Nishida speaks at a Tokyo forum on July 13 to review the summit and kick off preparations for GSW 2017 in Tokyo.
WOMEN HELP WOMEN

Now she devotes herself to women's empowerment and social innovation, while also working as a research consultant to promote open innovation and entrepreneurship at her own company Office Phronesis.

"As the GSW is coming to Japan next year, there are many things to do for the participants. Among the most important is to revitalize the local communities by women," she said.

One of her ideas is to add high value to women's handmade products and create items that fetch good prices. "And we can introduce female entrepreneurs who purchase and sell such products through the channel of the GSW," Nishida said. Also, WHW provides business information, know-how for marketing, training, consulting and more.

History repeats itself?

"When individuals can maximize their abilities and band together, they can make changes in society," Nishida stated. She said that she had an actual feeling of such a movement as part of society when she attended a recent TED summit, which was held in June in Banff, Canada. Nishida has been a member of the TEDxTokyo team since its early stages. Started in 2009, TEDxTokyo was the first independently organized TED event in Japan in the spirit of "ideas worth spreading" at the local level.

She sees potential in the recent ideas of a "sharing economy," a hybrid market model of peer-to-peer exchange, and technologies such as blockchain, a public ledger that records every transaction in e-currencies.

After many years serving as a researcher at the front line of the capitalism business, Nishida will live out her life pursuing her dream of social innovation by empowering women who are deep-rooted in the regional community.

"For example, I would like to create a small-scale, self-sufficient home and farm that can serve as a community center of my projects. I would like to leave such assets while I am still alive to those who will succeed and further develop the projects, rather than the home being exchanged for some money and dismantled after my death," Nishida said.

"Within the community, we might be able to directly exchange our products and services, as was done in the Middle Ages," she said with a smile.