Episode Details

"I'm here to be part of the team." "The longer you are somewhere, the more you realise you know nothing." "If your intention is positive, people will support you." "We want to be an international company in Japan." "It really starts by asking what is my impact? What can I do?"

Jasper Westerink is the CEO of Philips Japan and a Dutch executive whose career has been shaped by international leadership, adaptability, and a deep commitment to learning from local cultures. After completing university in the Netherlands, where he studied marketing, management, and business, he joined Philips with the initial idea of building a career in the Netherlands. Instead, an early opportunity to work in Thailand opened the door to a global career that would take him and his family across Thailand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Greece, Indonesia, South Africa again, and ultimately Japan.

Over many years with Philips, Westerink built a broad leadership perspective across emerging markets, developed markets, complex organisations, and highly diverse cultural environments. His Japan assignment brought together his global Philips experience, his interest in Japanese culture, and the company's need to connect Japan more closely with global Philips capabilities. In Japan, he has focused on trust-building, engagement, accountability, recognition, and helping Japanese teams share their world-class ideas more confidently with the global organisation.

Jasper Westerink's leadership story in Japan begins with a global career that gave him both confidence and humility. As CEO of Philips Japan, he arrived not as someone assuming he already understood the market, but as a guest who needed to listen, observe, and learn. Having worked across Thailand, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Greece, Indonesia, and other markets, he brought a rare breadth of experience to Japan. Yet his most important leadership insight is that the more time one spends in a country, the more one realises how much remains beneath the surface.

Japan struck Westerink as extraordinarily organised, harmonious, and safe. He noticed this first in daily life, from the punctuality of trains to the quiet consideration shown by people in public spaces. These visible behaviours pointed to deeper cultural systems. In business, he observed a strong preference for harmony, pre-alignment, and consensus. Unlike more confrontational management cultures, where executives may debate passionately in the room and make decisions on the spot, Japan often relies on nemawashi, informal pre-discussion, careful preparation, and the quiet work that happens before the formal meeting. By the time a decision reaches the table, much of the ringi-sho-style alignment has already occurred.

For a foreign CEO, this can feel slow or even passive at first. Westerink admits that he likes visible passion and energetic debate, but he came to understand that Japanese passion often sits below the surface. It may not appear in a formal meeting, yet it emerges in trusted settings, peer groups, customer discussions, informal conversations, and carefully structured opportunities to contribute.

One of his strongest methods for drawing out ideas is friendly peer competition. Philips Japan encourages doctors, physicians, and internal teams to share ideas around quality, AI, better patient outcomes, reduced workload, and operational improvement. Rather than making innovation a top-down CEO initiative, Westerink has found that peer recognition, team-based contribution, and "Made in Japan" pride help unlock ideas. Japanese employees may be modest, but many of their solutions are globally competitive. His job is to create safe structures that make it easier for them