Why a Takashimaya President in Paris Thinks Self-Leadership Comes First

Tomohiko Taya spent nearly three decades moving through fashion, food and wine divisions across Milan, Tokyo and Paris. The one rule that followed him everywhere: fix your own outlook before you try to fix anyone else’s.

Tomohiko Taya has spent 27 years at Takashimaya Group, moving from Milan’s fashion and wine trade to a shopping center food division in Nihombashi, and now to the top job at the retailer’s French subsidiary. Along the way, he built a theory of leadership that starts with managing a single person: yourself.

“Leading yourself is also a kind of leadership for me,” says Taya, a graduate of GLOBIS University’s Graduate School of Management. It’s an idea he’s had ample opportunity to test.

As General Manager for Takashimaya’s Europe and USA regions and President of Takashimaya France SA, he runs overseas purchasing and coordinates daily between headquarters in Japan and suppliers abroad, work that puts him squarely between two business cultures.

Before he could reconcile any of that for other people, he had to start by reconciling it in himself.

Appreciation as a management tool

For Taya, managing a team begins with managing your own outlook, and that outlook depends on a habit he returns to often: appreciation. “Appreciating somebody is itself a way of being positive,” he says. He treats optimism less as a personality trait than as a practice, one that must be maintained before it can be extended to a team.

That belief was tested hardest during the COVID-19 pandemic. Taya had been working in Japan, then found himself transferred to France just as the two governments moved in opposite directions. While Tokyo urged caution, Paris declared a return to normal. Taya had to follow the French government’s line even as his instincts, shaped in Japan, told him it was premature.

The disagreement wasn’t really about masks or reopening dates. It forced Taya to sit with two contradictory readings of the same crisis and ask which one was correct. His answer reshaped how he handles conflict at work: “This experience led me to think that both sides can be correct. It’s not about winning or losing, or right or wrong. Both can be right.”

His approach, thereafter, was to treat clashing opinions in business less as disputes to settle and more as different, equally valid vantage points on the same problem. Learning to manage conflicts is a critical part of developing holistic leadership, and having a structured framework to approach it can make all the difference.

Happiness as a business input, not a reward

Asked how he personally defines purpose and long-term value creation, Taya doesn’t lead with a framework. He leads with a mood. “I try to be very happy,” Taya says.

As it turns out, what’s good for the individual can also be good for the company: happy people, he argues, make businesses more likely to succeed. Research backs this up, with one study finding a 13% boost in productivity when employees were happy. He breaks that happiness into two ingredients he tracks deliberately: the process and the result.

The process, for him, means visible daily progress, a sense of moving forward rather than standing still. The result matters too, but he’s explicit that serving his own goals while also serving others is what actually produces the lift. It’s a small distinction, self-interest paired with contribution rather than either alone, and it’s the one he credits for keeping his own motivation steady through a three-decade career spanning food, fashion and wine.

Taking the longer view with a failing account

The long-term half of that same question shows up most clearly in how Taya handles a struggling account. His clearest example of long-term thinking involves a business relationship that was going badly enough that Takashimaya’s headquarters wanted to cut it.

Rather than close the account on the numbers alone, Taya kept talking with the partner, and the picture changed. “It’s not only the numbers or it’s not only the human relationships, but we can combine so many other aspects at the same time,” he says.

He draws a broader lesson from that episode about time horizons. A short-term view, he argues, narrows what you can see: your own business might look fine while your partner’s looks shaky, or the reverse, and either snapshot alone is misleading. A longer view lets you weigh both sides’ positions together and stay flexible about what a partnership is actually worth.

He suspects this kind of patience has particular relevance for European business culture, where leaders often operate under pressure to deliver short-term results and meet quarterly targets.

A career built on both sides of the ledger

Asked what Europe could learn from Japanese business philosophy, Taya points back to that same patience, the instinct to hold two views rather than pick one. The pattern runs through his own résumé, too

As Chief Representative of Takashimaya’s Milan office, he worked across fashion, food and wine. As General Managing Director of GOODLIVE CORPORATION, he ran wine import and distribution. As Director of the Food Division at Nihombashi Takashimaya Shopping Center, he managed the balance between sell-in and sell-out, the retail industry’s own version of weighing two truths against each other: what a store buys and what it actually sells.

Before you can reconcile two sides of any business problem, Taya’s career suggests you have to reconcile with yourself. The same logic of sell-in and sell-out applies within: what you stock in yourself is what eventually moves off the shelf.