Corporate Strategy
How BIOT sets direction as a Nasdaq-listed holding company: capital strategy, portfolio design, and the decisions behind the group structure.
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Explainers·
What is BIOT? INSTINCT BIO TECHNICAL COMPANY HOLDINGS INC., explained
BIOT is the Nasdaq ticker symbol of INSTINCT BIO TECHNICAL COMPANY HOLDINGS INC., a holding company incorporated in the Cayman Islands whose ordinary shares began trading on The Nasdaq Stock Market on 24 July 2026. Its operating businesses originate in Japan and span research and development, sourcing, manufacturing, regenerative medicine-related technologies, cosmetics, wellness and consumer brands. It is a separate legal entity from its operating subsidiaries, including INSTINCT BROTHERS.
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What does vertical integration mean in biotechnology?
Vertical integration means a single group owns consecutive stages of its value chain rather than buying them from third parties. In biotechnology that typically means research, materials sourcing, manufacturing, brand development and distribution sitting inside one corporate structure. The practical effect is control: one quality standard, traceability from material to finished lot, and faster iteration between research and product. It does not, by itself, make any product more effective, and it does not replace regulatory approval.
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On My IPO Day, I Ate Dinner at Home as Usual
"How did you celebrate your IPO day?" My honest answer: I didn't. On July 24, 2026, our company began trading on Nasdaq. That evening, I had an ordinary dinner at home.
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To Bring Joy to Friends — How My Name Became My Life
My parents chose characters that mean "to bring joy to friends." As a boy in Shimonoseki, a port town in western Japan, I simply could not study. Reading without understanding, failing at arithmetic — all I had was sports. When my junior high school had no soccer club, I switched to basketball, practiced relentlessly, and made the prefectural select team.
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Zero English, and a Plane to Canada 15 Days After Graduation
Fifteen days after graduating from high school, I was on a plane to Canada. I could not speak a single word of English. The trigger was one offhand remark from someone I respected: "Why not go study English abroad?" The moment I heard it, one thought arrived — why not, indeed.
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I Cried for a Month in Saskatoon — The Uses of Homesickness
My Canadian destination was Saskatoon — freezing winters, only a few dozen Japanese residents in town. An eighteen-year-old who knew only sports, with zero English, I spent my first month homesick and in tears. People only get serious when there is nowhere to run.
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"Why Not?" — The Single Remark That Changed My Life
Every turning point in my life began with someone else's casual remark. "Why not study English abroad?" sent me to Canada. "There's someone I'd like you to meet" introduced me to my lifelong business partner.
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No Soccer Team? Then Reach the Top in Basketball
In elementary school I lived for soccer — but my junior high school had no soccer club. A moment where sulking would be understandable. Instead, I started basketball and practiced relentlessly: mornings, evenings, holidays.
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Why We Won Small Tournaments and Lost the Big Ones
My boyhood soccer team won almost every local tournament — yet at the big tournaments, we always lost. Winning small but losing big: I've carried that frustration for forty years. Small stages can be won on individual talent; big stages are decided by total preparation and team design.
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From a Perfume-Loving Teenager to a Cosmetics Chairman
I loved perfume as a high schooler — just a simple "like," with no career calculation. Yet when I job-hunted after Canada, I chose a perfume maker from six offers, because I wanted to work near what I loved. The product development I learned there opened the door to a TSE-listed company, then to my own cosmetics business, and now forms the foundation of BIOT.
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What I Learned at a Tokyo Stock Exchange Company
My product development experience earned me a place at a company listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. There I saw a world that runs not on individual hustle but on systems — for quality, approval, responsibility. But once I ran my own company, I understood: a company without systems dies when its founder falls.
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The Day Two Men at Rock Bottom Started with Part-Time Work
When I met our Senior Managing Director, I was in the hardest stretch of my own life — and he was at rock bottom too. Two people at the bottom usually just lick each other's wounds. "Let's climb up together!" — we worked part-time jobs side by side while stacking up challenge after challenge.
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A Company Is a Work of Art — Why I Build Our Websites Myself
A confession: every website in our group — the holding company's, each subsidiary's, and this very series page — I built with my own hands. "Is that a chairman's job?" I've been asked. My answer is firm: this is precisely the chairman's job.
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Designing a Company on the Five Elements
Our group is designed on the five elements of Eastern philosophy — wood, fire, water, metal, earth. Wood (INSTINCT BROTHERS) grows products and brands; fire (INSTINCT RAS) ignites talent; water (HIROKI GLOBAL) carries trusted materials from around the world; metal (ARTISANS PRODUCTION) transforms materials into products; and the earth — our holding company — supports them all. Standard org charts describe functions; I wanted to design the company as a living organism, where each element generates the next and the whole circulates.
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The Day We Built Our Factory in Kakegawa
In 2019 we built our own factory in Kakegawa, Shizuoka. Outsourcing keeps you light — no capital investment, no maintenance, no hiring. We built anyway, because I refused to entrust the heart of our manufacturing to others.
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Time Flows from the Future Toward Us
Most people believe time flows from past to future. We believe the opposite: the future flows toward the present. This is not wordplay — it redesigns how you live.
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Yoshuku — Those Who Celebrate First Pull the Future In
Japan has an old tradition called yoshuku — "pre-celebration." Hanami, cherry-blossom viewing, was originally a ritual to celebrate autumn's harvest in advance: feast under the blossoms for rice not yet grown, and pull that future toward you. Long before our listing was certain, we raised glasses "as if" listed; we have already celebrated becoming a trillion-yen company, more than once. Pre-celebration makes a future yours — no longer an unseen goal but a landscape already tasted.
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Abandoning "I'll Do X Because Y Happened"
"Sales rose, so we invest." "Results came, so we praise." "We listed, so we celebrate." The world mostly runs on this grammar of because-then. Its true nature is hindsight: moving after seeing results is safe, but decisively slow — and those who move on hindsight walk forever behind the world. Our grammar is reversed: we invest, so sales rise; we trust first, so results come; we celebrate first, so the future arrives.
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Never Spend the Night at a Waypoint
When people reach a goal, they want to stay the night there — banquets, souvenirs, basking in the afterglow. On our listing day, I had an ordinary dinner at home and was moving toward the next blueprint that same day. It is comfortable, and comfort detains people; one night becomes many, and soon you are someone who talks about the past.
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If I Don't Smile, No One Around Me Will
My most important self-discipline as a chairman is not health or time management — it is my own smile. If I am not smiling, the people around me will never smile. A leader's expression becomes the organization's weather: if I cloud over, meetings cloud over, then the workplace, and eventually even customers feel it.
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What Neuroscience Taught Me at 45
I turn forty-five this year, and I have come to appreciate the power of brain science — not as an academic field, but as a simple truth: human drive is determined less by willpower than by the state of the brain. When I am excited, I work dawn to dusk without fatigue; ideas flow, decisions come fast. The same man, drained of excitement, finds even simple tasks heavy.
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My Thinking Is Probably Nothing Like My Seniors'
The world has many magnificent chairmen leading companies worth hundreds of billions — people whose track records dwarf mine. But my way of thinking is probably completely different from those great seniors'. I was a boy in Shimonoseki who couldn't study; I leapt to Canada with zero English, was saved by friends, climbed up from the bottom through part-time jobs.
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On Always Being Affirmative and Positive
Asked what I can do now, my first answer is fixed: remain positive and affirmative — always. It sounds ordinary, but anyone who runs a company knows how hard "always" is. On days of betrayal and unexpected walls, saying "it's over" is easy.
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I Have Decided Never to Run Away
Asked to state my management philosophy in one word: never run. It sounds gallant; the reality is muddier. In business, moments that tempt you to flee arrive regularly — unpleasant reports, heavy negotiations, cleaning up your own failures — and escape routes are always provided.
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What You Do After You Leap on Instinct
I have written repeatedly: trust your instinct and leap. Move on instinct, and a moment of "this isn't what I imagined" always arrives. People split in two: those who turn back declaring their instinct wrong, and those who correct course while moving.
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Koshien, First Round, 12-0 — Dream Big Anyway
Our Senior Managing Director once played at Koshien, Japan's legendary national baseball stadium. His high school team's motto: "The dream is national champions; the purpose is building character." Facing that outrageous dream in earnest carried them to their first national tournament — where they lost the opening game 12–0. He laughs: "Even so, it taught me everything.
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Senior Director's Theme: Enjoy Life
Our Senior Managing Director's essay opens: "Fifty years of life — my theme is 'enjoy life.'" His crushing loss at Koshien, business ups and downs, the grueling road to listing — all line up under that single phrase. "It must have been constant hardship, but inside my head it was fun. We were changing, growing, attempting what we'd never done — and that feeling converted pain into joy." No one can erase hardship, but you can give it meaning: pain understood as part of a challenge becomes the muscle ache of growth.
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Navigating Uncertain Times
Asked about the hardest stretch of our listing preparation, our Senior Managing Director wrote that he struggles to answer: "It was an endless series of firsts, so it was always hard — but once done, it's done, and I barely remember the hardship. The thrill of moving forward outweighed it." The one pain he did name: not knowing — how long it would take, how much it would cost, walls appearing one after another. People who answered 'Let's challenge it positively!' with 'Yes, let's!' — that was everything." When the road has no map, what works is not a map but the face walking beside you.
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"There Is Nothing We Have to Change"
After our listing was set, our Senior Managing Director thought hard and said: "I've been asking myself what must change now that we're a public company's officers — and my answer is: nothing. The real risk is becoming satisfied, stiff, conservative — ceasing to challenge. Changing in the bad sense is our greatest risk." Exactly.
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The Thrill of the First Bus Ride Alone
One of our executives wrote in his essay about his oldest memory: riding a bus alone for the first time as a young boy. The timetable had peeled off; he didn't know if the bus would come, or if the one that came was right; he lacked the courage to ask. Tension first — darting eyes, pounding heart — easing into relief, and only upon arrival, exhilaration.
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Festivals, Bamboo, and the Effort to Stand Out
The same executive's essay describes his town's unusual festival of carrying great bamboo poles — a month of preparation, working late with the town's adults, then four performances a day before crowds, walking tall and thinking "look how strong I am!" His reflection: "There I learned the joy of standing out — and that standing out requires effort." Profound. Adults hide the desire for recognition as something shameful; he converted it into fuel. The wish to be seen, rightly connected, becomes an engine of growth — for children, employees, and executives alike.
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The Night He Missed Olympic Selection and Turned Off the TV
As a national-team trainer, he had one clear dream: the Olympics. Appointed just after one Games ended, he gave three full years — Beijing was within reach. Then the verdict: not him, but his master would go.
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No Geniuses Required — How Ordinary People Beat Talent
His high school basketball team was no collection of prodigies — which is precisely why they discovered something. Unable to win on individual skill, they radically clarified roles: the runners, the coordinated defenders, the set-play executors. Design versus talent — and on a tour of Nagasaki they swept teams they had never beaten.
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The First Time He Saw Adults Enjoy Their Work
Of the day he first walked into our company at twenty-five, he wrote: "I was stunned. I had never in my life seen adults working with such joy." Every adult around him until then had been a complainer; work was suffering to be endured — that was normal. But the people here spoke of work with sparkling eyes and debated the future in earnest.
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Falling for the Man Called Chairman
The youngest executive's essay contains a line that makes me bashful: "Honestly, the biggest reason I joined this company was not the business — I fell for the chairman as a man." Embarrassing, but I write about it, because it holds the essence of hiring and organization. People ultimately follow not conditions but a person. Plans change, products change, offices and salaries change; the one thing that doesn't is "I want to go with this person." Those who join for conditions leave over conditions; those who join for a person prove their worth in hard times.
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An Ordinary Life in Rural Hiroshima
One of our executives grew up in rural Hiroshima — mountains, rivers, an utterly ordinary family. The future he pictured: "Grow up in Hiroshima, work in Hiroshima, become a grandfather there — a peaceful, ordinary life I took for granted." Today he leads a nationwide business as an executive officer of a Nasdaq- listed company in Tokyo. My point is not "never picture an ordinary life" — the opposite: even a young man who pictured the ordinary can be carried anywhere.
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Three Lessons From Losing Business to COVID
Alongside design work, he had built an import business from Europe — until COVID stopped the world. Lockdowns severed the trade at its root; the business he had built was finished. But he converted it into three lessons, written plainly in his essay.
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Never Stray From Your True Calling
From the pain of losing his business, he extracted a single line: "Having drifted from my true calling — design and creative work — was itself the greatest failure." Why do people drift from their calling? Because lucrative-sounding offers always arrive from outside it; one's own field looks plain, and the neighbor's grass looks green. Outside your calling, you are one of the crowd — your accumulated strengths don't apply, and you are dragged into battles of price and capital that bigger players win.
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Growing an 8-Team Tournament to 32 Nations
One of the businesses he now leads is a youth soccer tournament. It began as a small one-day event with just 8 teams. Today, with corporate sponsors, it has grown into a national-scale tournament — up to 32 teams over two days.
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How I Turned Around a Red-Ink Company at 43
A vivid chapter in our CFO's career: when a foreign asset manager's Japan unit was sinking, he took the president's seat at forty-three on a promise to turn it around. His first move, in one line from his essay: "Secure profitability through selection and concentration — pour our limited people only into businesses that earn." Result: profitable in two years; four years later, two billion yen in operating profit, the team grown from five to thirty. No magic — he simply stopped doing everything.
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Lost Job Overnight: Unexpected is Normal
In 2007, one of history's largest acquisitions — roughly twenty trillion yen — swallowed his bank within months, and he lost his job overnight. His own results were excellent; the Japan unit was thriving. Yet everything he had built vanished by a logic of capital on the other side of the planet.
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Human Stem Cells Struck Me Instantly
Why did a veteran of global finance choose us for his final act? Working furiously in Singapore, he received a call from an old audit-firm acquaintance: a Japanese company aiming to list was seeking a CFO. A conversation he would normally decline — but something nagged, so he listened.
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Profit is the Strength to Challenge
On profit we offer neither platitudes nor contrarianism. Our manifesto's fourth article is explicit: "Profit is the strength to challenge. We do not deny profit — it is fuel for challenging the future.
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Cherish Companions Who Rejoice Together
One of our executives wrote that he decided to join after being struck by words I spoke when we met through work: "Cherish the companions who rejoice together." Truthfully, I never invented this as a management philosophy — I have simply lived my name, Tomoki, "to bring joy to friends." But he heard it through his own pain: having lost a business, he knew firsthand that relationships of mutual rejoicing, not of profit and loss, are the true foundation of a lasting enterprise. Rejoicing together sounds easy and is not. Consoling a companion's failure is surprisingly manageable; the hard thing is rejoicing at a companion's success as if it were your own, without the quiet muddying of comparison.
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Never Give Up. Never Be Defeated. Never Lose Conviction.
Our principles, addressed to the world, are three lines in English: Never Give Up. They may look alike; they fight different enemies. "Never give up" fights your own heart — the voice at the wall whispering "enough." "Never be defeated" fights the outside — rivals, adversity, unexpected waves; pushed hard, you refuse to stay down.
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Set Fire to Talent
Within our group is a somewhat unusual marketing and branding company whose motto is: "Set fire to talent." I love this phrase — not "create" talent, not "find" it, but ignite it, resting on the premise that the talent is already there. I have witnessed this premise all my life. Canadian friends lit the fire in a boy who couldn't study.
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Management by Executive Essays
A company that has its executives write life essays is rare, apparently. I am convinced it is a serious management method, for three reasons. First, writing is an inventory: executives buried in daily operations will never articulate where they came from and where they are going unless the time is deliberately made.
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One Trillion Yen is Not the Purpose
We hold a long-term vision of a one-trillion-yen market capitalization. Reactions split in two: those who laugh, "How grandiose," and those who ask, "Why one trillion?" To the latter I answer: one trillion is not the purpose — it is a declaration of scale. Our purpose is to bring joy, smiles, and gratitude to every person in the world.
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Deciding by Faces, Not Just Numbers
Let me record my final check when a management decision hangs in the balance. I examine the numbers, of course — market size, margins, risk; management without numbers is gambling. But when the numbers are all in and I still waver, the last thing I look at is faces.
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Someday, Build a Town
Let me speak of our farthest dream: someday, we want to build a town. People gather from around the world; employment is born; people are paid, work together, and enjoy the town-building itself; the world's cultures arrive, mingle, and new culture is born. Because our purpose, pursued to its end, arrives there.
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What Comes After AI?
We already live in the age of the AI wars — companies worldwide racing to develop and deploy, believing the master of AI masters the next era. But a leader must always think about what comes next. After AI, I believe, comes quantum technology.
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Ready to Challenge the World
I once counted calmly: our leadership team is unexpectedly well- equipped for the world. Myself — four years and eight months in Canada, then global business at a perfume maker. A CFO with thirteen years stationed in Singapore, seasoned against international investors.
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What I Want 100-Year-Old Children to Say
Let me speak of management's time horizon. Corporate life expectancy is said to be around thirty years; most companies measure in quarters, plan in single years, and call three-to-five-year plans "long-term." As a listed company we fully honor our duties on that clock. But we carry another clock besides — one that ticks in centuries.
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No Success Without Dreams – Yoshida Shoin
I and one of our executives were born in Yamaguchi — home, in the final days of the shogunate, to Yoshida Shoin. The executive closed his essay with Shoin's words: "Without dreams, no ideals. Therefore: without dreams, no success." Its power is that what looks like spiritual exhortation is in fact a perfect blueprint: dream → ideal → plan → execution → success, each step logically joined.
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A Team That Enjoys Overcoming Walls
Our Senior Managing Director wrote these words for future companions: "Honestly, our strength may not yet fully merit the pride of a listed company. But turned over, that means our room to grow — our blank canvas — is enormous. But it's all right: we are a team that enjoys climbing over walls." I love the honesty — a listed company's senior director publicly admitting strength "may not yet suffice," where most would posture, then re-reading the weakness as an enormous canvas.
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What Wish is in Your Name?
As this series has often told, my name Tomoki carries my parents' wish: "to bring joy to friends." Forty-five years later, my management philosophy is "cherish the companions who rejoice together" and my company's purpose is "make everyone smile." The name's wish and the life's content have converged. A name is the first blueprint parents give a child — a small prayer repeated every time it is called. Forty-five years of being called Tomoki, I truly believe, steered my life toward friends and joy.
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Setback May Be Preparation for Next Encounter
A line one executive placed at the end of his essay, which I reread often: "Failure may have been preparation for the next encounter." He lost his business to COVID — his life's greatest setback — but it taught him to return to his true calling, and on that path he met me. So he could rename failure "preparation." Everyone in this series lives the same structure: past the despair of zero English I met lifelong friends; my partner met me just after losing everything; the man denied his Olympic dream became a businessman beyond that bitterness. In the midst of a setback, no one can believe it is preparation — I couldn't either.
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From Which Future Does Your Blueprint Come?
Let me hand you, one last time, the philosophy of time this series has repeated — as a tool of your own. The future's time flows toward the present: we decide the future first and live today by back-calculation; the listing and what lies beyond were all drawn on the blueprint in advance. Now, a question: from which future is your today back-calculated?
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Memory of That First Bus Step – First Courage
Nearing this series' close, let me speak of first courage. I once wrote of an executive's oldest memory: a young boy's first solo bus ride — the timetable peeled away, no certainty the bus would come or was the right one, no courage to ask, sweat on his nose. I will quote this story forever, because every challenge in life is a repetition of that first bus.
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Konosuke Matsushita — The Man Who Turned Three "Withouts" Into Blessings
Konosuke Matsushita, revered as the god of Japanese management, described his origins through three "withouts": born without wealth, without education, without health. Leaving school at nine for an apprenticeship, he founded what became Panasonic at twenty-three and built a global enterprise in one lifetime. The astonishing part: he spoke of the three "withouts" as blessings.
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Ibuka and Morita — A "Delightful Ideal Factory" in the Ashes
Tokyo, 1946, amid the ruins: a small company was born in a corner of a department store — Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, later Sony. Engineer Masaru Ibuka and sales genius Akio Morita wrote into their founding prospectus the goal of "a free, open-minded, and pleasant ideal factory" where earnest engineers could exercise their skills to the fullest. In a defeated nation without goods or money, their first banner was not a sales target but joyful work.
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Eiichi Shibusawa — 500 Companies, Not One Made His Own
Eiichi Shibusawa — now the face of the ten-thousand-yen note — was born a farmer's son, became a shogunal retainer, witnessed European capitalism at the Paris Exposition, served the Meiji government, then plunged into business. His output defies belief: beginning with the First National Bank, he was involved in roughly five hundred companies — banking, paper, spinning, railways, gas, insurance — single-handedly tilling the foundations of modern Japanese industry. But his true greatness is not the number: across five hundred companies, he built no zaibatsu, no family empire, believing a company is a vessel of public good, not private gain.
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Sontoku Ninomiya — Sekisho Idai: Great Things From Small
Sontoku Ninomiya — the boy reading books while hauling firewood — was a far more formidable businessman than the statue suggests. Floods destroyed his family's fields; orphaned, the family scattered. Living with an uncle who scolded him for wasting lamp oil on reading, he grew his own rapeseed to trade for oil and kept studying; he planted seedlings on waste ground, converted them to rice, and step by step restored his family.
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Yozan Uesugi — "If You Act, It Is Done" — Begun at 17
"If you act, it can be done; if you do not, it cannot — in all things, failure is the fruit of not doing." Every Japanese knows these words of Yozan Uesugi, lord of the Yonezawa domain. When he succeeded, the domain was so deep in debt that returning it to the shogunate was discussed. An ordinary young lord would have hidden behind retainers; Yozan did not.
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Taro Okamoto — The Artist Who Kept Choosing the Dangerous Road
Taro Okamoto, famous for "Art is explosion," was also a man of words, and my favorite of his is this: "When in doubt, choose the dangerous path." At eighteen he moved to Paris for a decade, fought amid the avant-garde, and on returning declared open war on the conventions of Japan's art world — refusing prettiness, rediscovering the raw vitality of Jomon pottery, burning brighter with every criticism. His culmination was the Tower of the Sun at Expo '70: at a fair themed on harmony, he built a bizarre tower that smashed through harmony itself. Controversial then, it is the one thing everyone remembers half a century later.
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Naomi Uemura — Adventure Means Coming Home Alive
First to summit the highest peaks of five continents; solo to the North Pole by dog sled. Naomi Uemura was Japan's greatest adventurer — yet his brilliance, I believe, lay less in bravery than in his timidity. He called himself a coward, and therefore prepared beyond preparation: a year learning dog handling from polar peoples, equipment tested exhaustively, retreat never a shame.
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Hideki Yukawa — Paper, Pencil, and Light for a Defeated Nation
In 1949 — four years after defeat, amid ruins and food shortages — news raced through Japan: Hideki Yukawa had won the nation's first Nobel Prize. His weapons were neither apparatus nor vast funding, but paper and pencil. At twenty- seven he predicted, by theory alone, the meson — an unseen particle binding protons and neutrons within the nucleus — later confirmed by experiment to the world's astonishment.
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The Wright Brothers — The Day a Bicycle Shop Beat a National Project
On December 17, 1903, on the dunes of North Carolina, humanity first achieved powered flight — by two bicycle shop brothers from Ohio. Twelve seconds, thirty-six meters; those twelve seconds changed the world. The tale's delight lies in the rival: the era's favorite was Professor Langley's team, famous and funded lavishly by the government.
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Walt Disney — Bankruptcy, a Stolen Rabbit, and One Mouse
Walt Disney's early life is a catalog of failure. His first animation company went bankrupt. His comeback creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was seized through a contractual trap — distributor keeping the rights, staff poached, nearly everything lost.
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Steve Jobs — The Exiled Founder and His Dots
The chapter of Steve Jobs's story I find most important is not success but exile. Founding Apple in a garage at twenty-one and changing the world, he was thrown out of his own company at thirty. From that humiliation he never stopped: he founded NeXT, grew Pixar, changed cinema with Toy Story — and twelve years later returned to a failing Apple to fire off the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.
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Muhammad Yunus — A Bank That Began With 27 Dollars
Muhammad Yunus, teaching economics at university, reportedly agonized over the gap between elegant theory in the lecture hall and the reality outside. He walked into a village and found women weaving bamboo stools, borrowing material money from usurers, left with pennies for a day's work. He tallied what they actually needed: for forty-two villagers, a total of twenty-seven dollars.
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Why Celebrating in Advance Starts the Brain's Engine — The Science of Yoshuku
Let me examine our practice of yoshuku — celebrating in advance — from the brain's side. Honestly: "dream it and it comes true" is not supported by science; research reports that merely fantasizing about achievement can trick the brain into feeling it already has the prize, draining energy for action. Studies suggest those who vividly picture the desired future and squarely face present obstacles — psychologists call it mental contrasting — act the most.
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Dopamine Fires on Approach, Not Arrival — The True Nature of Excitement
Research on dopamine, the brain chemical deeply tied to drive, reports a crucial property: it works more strongly while approaching an anticipated reward than at the moment of receiving it. The brain burns hottest not when it has obtained, but while it feels itself closing in. This matches my fifty years of experience exactly — the days running toward our listing were hotter than the listing day itself.
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Smiles Are Contagious — A Leader's Face Is a Corporate Asset
"If I am not smiling, no one around me will smile" — my conviction apparently has scientific backing. Psychology has long studied emotional contagion: people unconsciously mirror the expressions and vocal tones before them, and the mirrored expression moves their own emotions in turn. The facial feedback effect — we don't only smile because we're happy; smiling can nudge happiness — has been studied for decades.
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Writing Orders the Mind — The Science Behind Management by Essay
When our executives wrote their life essays, one said: "I finally organized what my life has been." That sense of writing-as-organizing has a research pedigree. Psychology has long studied the effects of repeatedly writing about one's own significant experiences; a well-known line of studies reports beneficial changes in people who wrote for some minutes daily across several days. Writing gives swirling events the shape of a story — with a beginning and an end — and a shaped experience leaves the whirlpool of rumination and settles onto a shelf.
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Motivation Can Be Managed — My Daily Routine at Forty-Five
To close the first half of Season 1.5, let me publish my own daily brain-maintenance routine — nothing special, everything with a reason. Morning: look at the blueprint of the future and confirm today's work is part of it, igniting the approach state. Order tasks by closeness to the blueprint, not by mood.
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Connection Is Health — The Science of Companions Who Rejoice Together
This half of Season 1.5 closes by grounding our philosophy — "cherish the companions who rejoice together" — in the science of health. A famous research synthesis integrating data on hundreds of thousands of people compared predictors of long-term health and longevity and reported that the richness of social connection was among the strongest, with loneliness argued to rival widely known lifestyle risks. The director of a celebrated decades-long study of adult life concluded that what most determines happiness and health is neither wealth nor fame, but good relationships.
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The Brain Writes While You Sleep — Sleep and Memory
The next ten essays are original pieces in which I retell what brain science has shown in my own language as a manager and a man. Neuroscience reports that memory is consolidated not at the moment of learning but during sleep: the sleeping brain replays the day, moves what matters onto long-term shelves, and discards the rest. Learning does not end at the desk; it is completed in bed.
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Ideas Arrive When You Walk — Movement and the Brain
Good ideas do not arrive at the desk; they arrive while walking — and that is not merely a feeling. The effect of exercise on the brain is among the most active research areas of recent years: aerobic activity is reported to enhance factors supporting the growth and survival of neurons, with benefits for memory-related regions, mood stability and concentration, and experiments have reported broader idea generation while walking. Until I left for Canada at eighteen I was nothing but an athlete; I could not study, but I never stopped moving my body — and perhaps those years built the foundation of my brain.
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One Breath Switches the Body — The Physiology of Tension
Before any big moment I do exactly one thing: exhale slowly and long. Research on the autonomic nervous system shows that inhaling and exhaling shift heart rate and bodily state; a slow, extended exhale is reported to support the calming side of the system. When tension shortens the breath, the body concludes "danger" and thinking narrows; deliberately lengthening the breath sends the opposite signal from body to brain.
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Why the Brain Says "Tomorrow" — The Anatomy of Procrastination
Procrastination is not weak will; it is the natural consequence of how the brain values time. Behavioral economics repeatedly confirms that people steeply discount the future: the same reward feels smaller when distant, while a small pleasure at hand looms large. "Success in three years" loses to "one more drink tonight." The human brain comes fitted with a lens that shrinks whatever is far away.
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We Grow Strong Because We Laugh — Laughter and Stress
When I say we exist to increase the world's total volume of smiles, it is not a sentimental slogan; laughter does measurable work in the body. Studies report lower indicators of stress-related hormones in states of laughter and positive emotion, along with changes in pain perception and immune markers. The magnitude and conditions remain carefully debated, but the direction — that laughter moves bodily state — is widely supported.
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Name the Fear and It Shrinks — On the Amygdala
Becoming the chairman of a listed company does not remove anxiety. Because it does not, I learned how to handle it. Neuroscience reports that attaching verbal labels to emotion is accompanied by reduced activity in the amygdala, the region tied to fear and anxiety — a phenomenon called affect labeling.
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Meaning Over Reward — The Research on Intrinsic Motivation
My answer: raise it, yes — but pay alone is not enough. Psychology has reported that adding external rewards to behavior people already enjoy can reduce the motivation welling up from within, and a widely known framework holds that sustained effort requires a sense of deciding for oneself (autonomy), of getting better (mastery), and of doing something that matters (purpose). I have watched this on the floor for decades: at the same salary, the person who is trusted with a decision grows; at the same task, the person who knows whom it is for endures.
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The Brain Can Change at Any Age — Plasticity as Hope
Season 1.5 closes with the one line I most want to leave: the brain can change at any age. It was once believed that adult brains were fixed. Neuroscience has repeatedly shown otherwise — neuroplasticity, the continual remaking of neural connections through experience and learning.
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