60 seconds with eiji tateishi: “the ability to see a problem differently often begins with unlearning what you assume you already know.”

One of the things that never fails to impress me is what young people are thinking about, questioning, and challenging, especially when their perspectives are shaped by experiences in different corners of the world. It's one of the reasons I love the Global Peter Drucker Forum's Drucker Challenge, which gives young thinkers from around the globe a platform to share their ideas and learn from one another across generations and cultures. Being a part of the Drucker Challenge laureate family has been one of the coolest experiences of my professional writing career. 

This week's Q&A features Eiji Tateishi of Japan, who won first place in the student category of the 2026 Drucker Challenge for his essay, Between Tradition and Transition. A second-year student at Keio University, Eiji has lived in Japan, the United States, Spain, and Kenya, where he recently spent approximately 40 days conducting nonprofit fieldwork. His experiences have shaped a fascinating perspective on innovation, cultural assumptions, and the responsibility we have to consider how our decisions affect others.

The way we see the world depends so much on where we stand in it, and there's a lot we can learn by listening to someone standing somewhere else. I'm delighted to introduce you to Eiji and share his thinking with you.

— meg

toth shop (ts): In 10 words or less, tell us what you're thinking about these days.

Eiji Tateishi (ET): The success of the 79th Japan-America Student Conference held next year. 

ts: What’s the Peter Drucker quote or book/work that you will always carry the flag for? 

ET: "Profit is not the explanation, cause, or rationale of business behavior and business decisions, but the test of their validity." (The Practice of Management, 1954)

As a business management major, it was eye-opening to realize that maximizing profit and shareholder value is not a business's purpose. Profit does not explain why a business acts; it tests whether its decisions are sound. The purpose, as Drucker put it in the same book, is to create a customer and, in turn, to serve society.

This idea has shaped how I see success more broadly. In Japan, we measure people by numbers: exam scores, university rankings, company names, salaries. Those goals are loaded into us so smoothly that following them feels like choosing them, and I call this cultural autopilot. It produces knowledge workers in form, but interchangeable parts in substance. The numbers can tell you that the cogs are turning, but not whether the machine is heading somewhere worth going. That is a question every organization, and every person, has to answer for themselves.

ts: This year’s Drucker Forum is focusing on next-generation innovation. What responsibility do innovators have to consider the social consequences of what they create?

ET: Innovators should consider the consequences not only for their customers but also for people outside their customer base. Organizations today are woven into the rest of the world, and no organization can draw a line around itself and decide that what happens on the other side is not its problem. Innovation, especially transformative innovation, will reach people innovators never intended to serve.

I see innovation as a means and not an end. Its value lies in expanding people's capabilities, and guaranteeing the freedom to live lives that people choose and value. Judged that way, social consequences are not side effects, but they are part of the result.

Lake Victoria shows what happens when this is forgotten. On one shore, as the documentary Darwin's Nightmare records, industrial fishing raised exports and GDP and was praised as successful development, while the communities that had fished there for generations dissolved. There is a difference between innovation a community cultivates in its own soil and innovation that treats that soil as ground to be cleared.

However, the responsibility does not belong to innovators alone. It is natural for innovators to advocate for their own innovation, because that is their role and in their own interest. So we, as citizens and consumers, also need to question the premises we are handed and rethink what we actually want. We need to be humble, in the sense of knowing what we do not know, so that society has the knowledge and guiding principles to judge innovation instead of blindly receiving it.

ts: Does innovation begin with a new idea, or with the ability to see and describe an existing problem differently?

ET: I believe that innovation begins with seeing the problem, and the idea comes second. An idea that answers no real problem, and that no one needs, is not meaningful innovation. The innovation lies in connecting the issue with the means, the "how," of solving it.

But seeing clearly is harder than it sounds. On Rusinga Island in Kenya, I spent four hours pulling a net with local fishermen for a share worth about ten shillings. I was certain I was looking at a textbook case of inefficiency. That night, the lake filled with hundreds of boats, each carrying a light that drew insects, which in turn drew fish into the nets. Nobody had taught them Drucker's definition of innovation as "the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth," but they were already living it, through knowledge their own community had built.

My first judgment was not observation. It was my own cultural autopilot. The ability to see a problem differently often begins with unlearning what you assume you already know.

ts: Why do some transformative ideas gain momentum while equally strong ideas struggle to be understood?

ET: Being right is not the same as being persuasive. A light bulb in Tokyo is just a light bulb. On Rusinga, hundreds of them became what the fishermen call the Ghost City. Culture decides what an idea means.

A strong idea can still fail if it is delivered without thinking about who is hearing it. Before explaining an idea, it is crucial to define the audience, what they need, and what the idea means to them. Something that seems obviously correct to the innovator may still fail to answer the question the other person is actually asking.

Through the Japan-America Student Conference, I have learned how difficult it is to convey an idea across cultures, even when we all share a language. The problem is not the vocabulary but the predetermined norms and premises on how we disagree, how we decide, and what we count as agreement. “Transformative” ideas are solely transformative under our lens of thought, and unless most people perceive it that way, it can not be deemed an “objective” definition. 

This is not only about convincing customers, but also regulators, governments, communities, and public opinion. So a non-market strategy, deciding how you will work with those stakeholders, matters as much as the idea itself.

ts: Every person we interview answers this same question last. Mile 18 is generally considered to be one of the hardest miles in a marathon. You're hitting a wall. You're forced to dig deep. What's Mile 18 in your line of work—or at a point in your career—and what do you tell yourself when you find yourself in the middle of a Mile 18?

ET: Mile 18 for me is the wall between ideals and reality. As a university student, my job is to study theory and accumulate knowledge from the past. However, society puts its emphasis on practice, and ideals are not implemented just because they are said to be right.

When I hit that wall, I tell myself to look back and stand on the shoulders of giants. People before me almost certainly hit the same wall, and the world is the way it is for a reason. Theories have changed over time together with society, so I try to understand the whole flow, not isolated fragments. Usually, whatever I'm thinking, someone great has thought about it before, and that is not discouraging at all to me. Knowledge passed from generation to generation portrays the human arc of improvement through the clashes of values, and this means that no one has to find the route over the wall alone.