Ron McFarland

2915 points

Tokyo, Japan

Ron McFarland has been working in Japan for over 40 years, and he's spent more than 30 of them in international sales, sales management training, and expanding sales worldwide. He's worked in or been to more than 80 countries. Over the most recent 17 years, Ron had established distributors in the United States and throughout Europe for a Tokyo-headquartered, Japanese hardware cutting tool manufacturer. More recently, he's begun giving seminars in English and Japanese to people interested in his overseas travels and expanding business overseas. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Open Source Sensei People's Choice Award Sustainability Author Contributor Club Open Organization Ambassador

Authored Content

Open exchange, open doors, open minds: A recipe for global progress

Openness, this new book argues, has always been a necessary cornerstone of human civilization.

Architecture and design planning layouts

Know your organization's rule makers and rule breakers

By sensing and responding to an organization's cultural norms, open leaders can achieve a great deal.

Working meetings can be effective meetings

A guide to understanding your team's implicit values and needs

To enhance team dynamics, open leaders can study the implicit social norms that guide members' behaviors and decisions.

Japan at a crossroads: How open organization principles aided the country's economic resurgence

Why have some organizations successfully weathered recent economic shifts in Japan while others haven't? Openness could be the key.

Lessons in openness from Japan's "business reinvention"

This new book explains how Japan's economic resurgence in recent decades coincided with greater transparency, collaboration, and inclusivity.

A more sustainable future should be a more open future

Applying open organization principles can help us build the kind of global governance and foster the cooperation necessary to address climate and humanitarian development.

Authored Comments

Ron McFarland

18 Jun 2022

Using habits to practice open organization principles

If you're interested in more sources on this presentation on the book "The Chimp Paradox". It gives a fun little presentation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir2PnkgH0bA

It talks about three parts of the brain, namely "The Human", The Chimp" and "The Computer".

Ron McFarland

6 Jun 2022

The path to an open world begins with inclusivity

In this article I talked about the problem of stereotypes of members from outside groups. There is an opportunity there too, but the outside group representative must be selected very carefully. I'm just reading "Team of Teams" by Stanley Allen McChrystal. He writes that planting a person from an outside group (team) into another can offer the strengths of both groups (teams).