The 100 Year Vision of Japan's J-League

Although the J-League is Japan's men's national league (not the women's game which our focus) the 100 Year Vision of Japan's J-League is worth taking a look at from a league strategy perspective. There is value in exploring trends and strategies beyond your immediate industry, to avoid too narrow analyses and to recognize the inter-relatedness of industries and competitive forces in an increasingly globalized marketplace.

The overarching 100 Year vision is to utilize the J-League as an agent of change, by nurturing a sport culture in Japan rooted in community-based sports clubs. The atmosphere and excitement of the J-League stadium is at the core of J-League's work to build a rich sporting environment for all of Japan. Each club has a firm geographical base, is loved and supported by the city, local fans, businesses and government. Meanwhile, the clubs create an environment for a healthy fully-integrated sports culture for children to its own first team squad.

The J-League provides an opportunity for an exclusive partnership tied to the 100 Year Vision. Currently the partner is Asahi Shimbun, one of the national newspapers.

A 100 Year Vision can act as your business' North Star, an ultimate goal or a state of being that encapsulates your brand ethos - what it stands for beyond hitting financial targets. A longer plan horizon can provide benefits - it tends to make room for more ambitious goals, providing the time to accomplish them. Certainly alongside this Vision it's important to have a strategic plan outlining how the company will get after the more short term, mid term and long term priorities. Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad's theory of Strategic Intent proposes that companies should set aggressive goals and then expand their resource base to meet its ambition: "Realistic goals promote incremental moves; only unrealistic goals provoke breakthrough thinking." (Hamel and Prahalad, 1989, HBR). Strategic Intent usually contains stretch targets, forcing companies to compete in innovative ways. Hamel and Prahalad argue that Western companies tend to focus on trimming ambitions to match resources. By contrast, Japanese companies maximize resources to elevate the organization's ability to try to attain seemingly impossible goals.

When Japan's Konosuke Matsushita founded his electronics company in 1918 (now called Panasonic), he reportedly created a 250 year strategic plan. The plan was comprised of 10 and 25 year sections, to line up with succeeding management. This is an overwhelming task in any industry and most especially in the electronics area which sees rapid technological advances.

Fast forward to today, we are in a very different business context in the 21st century. With a highly globalized inter-connected world, businesses can be affected by so many variables that it's difficult to factor it all in to business planning decisions. Enter, Henry Mintzberg's Emergent Strategy theory: a view that strategy emerges over time as intent collides with a changing reality. So the company learns in practice. With our rapid technological advances, Matsushita is a prime example of how companies, leagues included, must layer in emergent strategies into their original strategic planning.


Further Discussion
No details are available that show how achieving the 100 Year Vision is measured and evaluated by the J-League management, if at all. Although attendance is only one indicator of how much a club might be embedded into a city and the influence it has on the community's sport culture, let's take a look at the attendance numbers between 1993 and 2010 (graph taken from the 11 Million Project* review on the J-League website). The aggregate attendance at J-League matches per season has just more than doubled. However, during the same period the number of teams in the league almost quadrupled (10 teams to 37 teams):

If a by-product of firm integration into the community is increased attendance, then it seems the J-League has yet to truly begin tracking towards it's 100 Year Vision. However, many other metrics (outside the scope of this article) can be studied to truly understand the effectiveness of the Vision.

* The 11 Million Project was a league-wide initiative undertaken from 2007-2010 with the goal to achieve attendance of 11 million fans at all official J-League matches. The goal was not achieved but the multi-year project provided benefits and learnings to be more fan-centric.