Episode Details

"this job is really primarily a people job"

"if you get the right people, you don't have to spend a lot of time micromanaging; get out of their way and let them do their thing"

"you have to be the type of boss that people are not afraid to bring bad news"

"you all have everything you need to be successful at Dow"

"if you treat Japanese people with integrity, trust, respect, like you would want to be treated like anywhere else in the world, you're going to be fine"

Brief Bio Peter Jennings is President of Dow in Japan and Korea, overseeing a multi-billion-dollar business and thousands of employees across both markets. He joined Dow as an attorney and spent twenty-seven years in legal roles before being unexpectedly tapped for senior business leadership. Before moving to Japan in 2012, he served in Hong Kong as general counsel for Dow Asia Pacific and later returned to the United States for several senior assignments. His transition from legal counsel to country president reflects a career shaped by adaptability, deep institutional knowledge, and a strong people-first philosophy. In Japan, he became Dow's longest-serving president in the market's history, leading cultural renewal, leadership development, diversity initiatives, and a more open, internationally minded operating model inside a long-established Japanese organisation.

Peter Jennings presents a compelling case that leadership success in Japan does not begin with technical mastery, perfect language, or rigid adherence to stereotype. It begins with trust. When he arrived in Japan in 2012, one year after the Tohoku earthquake, he came not as a traditional commercial operator but as a long-serving Dow lawyer with deep corporate knowledge and international experience. That unusual path could easily have created distance between him and a highly experienced Japanese leadership team. Instead, it became an advantage because he did not arrive pretending to know everything. He arrived listening.

His early approach was simple and disciplined. He met leaders individually, asked about their biggest issues, wrote everything down, and focused on how he could help. In a market where nemawashi, ringi-sho, consensus-building, and careful internal alignment still shape decision-making, that restraint mattered. Rather than impose a foreign leadership template, Jennings worked to understand how trust and respect are earned locally. He recognised that formal authority in Japan means little unless people feel safe enough to speak candidly.

Over time, the proof of progress was behavioural. Senior staff started challenging him privately after meetings. Employees began dropping by for coffee or lunch. More importantly, people brought bad news earlier. For Jennings, that was a decisive signal of culture change. He argues that if people fear punishment, information gets buried. In a high uncertainty avoidance environment, leaders must reduce the interpersonal risk of honesty before they can improve decision quality. That is where leadership and decision intelligence meet: better outcomes come from better information flow, not louder authority.

He also reshaped the leadership bench. Over several years, Dow Japan moved from a more traditional senior male model towards a younger, more diverse, bilingual, bicultural team. Jennings takes particular satisfaction not in personal advancement but in seeing talented people, especially women, promoted into larger roles. He frames leadership as removing obstacles, securing resources, and backing capable people rather than controlling them. That is a significant shift a