Ohmae, Kenichi (1943– )

Japanese management strategist and former partner of McKinsey Consultants in Tokyo. He worked for Hitachi as a senior design engineer on Japan's prototype fast breeder reactor before joining McKinsey's in 1972. A partner for the next 23 years, he co-founded its strategic management practice, serving companies in a wide range of industries. He left McKinsey in 1994 to form his own management consultancy, Ohmae & Associates. Ohmae is renowned for his work on globalization. In his book The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (1990), he demonstrates that the modern global economy has taken over the economic power once held by sovereign states.

Ohmae founded the Reform Heisei, a citizen's reform movement, and unsuccessfully ran for the governorship of Tokyo in 1995. He is the author of over 50 books and is an adviser to major international corporations and leading political figures.

In his book The Invisible Continent: Four Strategic Imperatives of the New Economy (2000) Ohmae looked to the future of business in the age of electronic commerce, examining the relationship between the old economy titans, such as IBM and General Motors, and the new economy ‘Godzillas’, such as Microsoft, Cisco, and Dell. He demonstrated the developing battleground between global corporations and the governments that try to regulate them.

Ohmae was a graduate of Waseda University, in chemistry, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (with an MS in nuclear engineering), and received a PhD in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is said to be a talented flautist.