Student Voices: How London Business School Helped Me See Japan — And Myself — In A New Light

Chinnapat Sertthin: “Strategy and culture cannot be separated – something our core Sloan strategy and leadership classes underlined”

It’s the last day of my LBS Sloan Masters in Leadership and Strategy, just after my final class, and my nameplate is still lying in its slot in the lecture hall. In a quiet moment of reflection, I think about all I have learned and how the program has helped me find a clearer sense of purpose as I move into the next chapter of my career. So many parts of my LBS experience were distinctive, but one stands out as an absolute highlight – my Global Experience course in Japan. 

Global Experiences are one-week, faculty-led courses in different countries where classroom ideas are tested against real companies, real people and real constraints, and where theory is constantly checked against what actually happens on the ground.

Choosing Tokyo felt less like a decision and more like an instinct to return, because Japan has always been at the center of my story. I spent six years in Japan, completing my master’s and Ph.D. in telecommunications engineering at Keio University and conducting research with a Japanese company. It is where my professional identity was formed. 

I was looking forward to learning from the faculty leading the course – Lynda Gratton, whose work on management practice and longevity I already knew well, and Marcus Alexander, whose perspective on strategy I was curious to experience in person. I wanted to see how their lenses on strategy, longevity and working lives would change the way I saw a place that still feels like a second home. At the same time, a small voice in my head kept asking a simple question: in a city I know so well, how much more could I really learn in only five days?

Once the course started, all doubts were assuaged. It felt as if my six years of experience had been compressed into five days of intensive learning from multiple angles. Valuable insights from non-Japanese nationals working in Tokyo, visits to traditional Japanese companies and modern global firms, sessions with technology and national strategy experts – each layer added context and gently challenged what I thought I already knew. 

A visit to Tokio Marine held an additional, profound meaning for me. During my Ph.D., I received a merit scholarship from the Tokio Marine Foundation. Walking into their building years later as an LBS Sloan Fellow, I felt a quiet mix of gratitude and curiosity. I wanted to see how the company that had supported me as a young researcher had evolved and whether the values I had imagined were really reflected in how they did business.

Tokio Marine has a stated goal to not just pay claims after an event, but to help prevent loss in the first place. What impressed me was how consistently the company’s principle of doing good appeared in the softer details. Two days before our visit, the Chief Sustainability Officer came to meet us at LBS’s Worldwide Alumni Celebration in Tokyo. She did not give a big speech. Instead, she listened carefully, asked thoughtful questions and showed a genuine interest in who we were and why we were there. She mirrored the company’s values, which made the culture feel very real. 

Strategy and culture cannot be separated – something our core Sloan strategy and leadership classes underlined. At Tokio Marine, that idea did not feel like a clever phrase. It felt like something embedded in the organization’s DNA. As I walked out of the building, I felt inspired by their simple mission to “be a good company,” and realized that I want to build or support businesses that, like Tokio Marine, can grow, expand globally and still hold on to a straightforward promise: to make people feel safer and more supported in a world that is becoming more uncertain.

One insight from a session on how Japan’s highly advanced domestic systems sometimes face challenges when being scaled globally has stayed with me: “If perfection is the answer, innovation is not your business.” To me, this is a reminder of how we should think about future work in technology. What we build should connect with global standards and real human behavior, rather than stand alone as a beautiful but isolated solution. Only then can it make it easier for people and businesses to adapt in a world that is changing faster than many institutions can keep up with.

The most intriguing part of the course was the peer learning. After each class and visit, we discussed what we had seen – the silence and ritual at Meiji Jingu shrine, the noise and color of Akihabara’s game centers, the layout of a neighborhood supermarket. Through these conversations, familiar streets and buildings began to look different, as if someone had adjusted the focus and broadened my perspective.

While our group discussions often ended with more questions than answers, they showed me how much can be learned when different personal stories and national experiences are placed side by side. Presenting what we had learned on the last day of the program, I was especially impressed by one of my classmates, Ziping Chen MBA2026, who sketched a thoughtful comparison of the demographic pressure and rapid technological change faced by Japan and other countries. Hearing her perspective on their differing approaches to social harmony, industrial policy, and international integration made me realize that the challenges faced by Japan are ones that many other countries, including my own, will soon have to navigate. 

Looking back now, what makes the Tokyo Global Experience so important to my Sloan journey is not only the content, but the way it connected three things: who I have been, what I have learned and who I hope to become. Revisiting Japan through the course structure, through the lens of faculty who think deeply about strategy and working lives, and through the fresh eyes of my classmates allowed me to see familiar places and institutions in a new way. More than anything, it reminded me that technology, strategy and culture are always intertwined. From this, I have learned that using technology to make a positive impact on society and business means designing solutions that people can actually use, that fit within real organizations, and that help them adapt confidently to a world that is changing faster than we expect.

Chinnapat (aka Parn) Sertthin is a Sloan Master’s student at London Business School with a background in technology and business transformation. He earned a Ph.D. in Telecommunication Engineering from Keio University in Japan, where he developed a deep appreciation for precision and innovation. Over the past 13 years, he played a key role in scaling his family’s bakery OEM in Thailand into a leading partner for major retail chains nationwide, driving growth through operational excellence, technology innovation, and strategic leadership.

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