In this installment of Thought Leadership, we highlight Sanshiro Yamaoka, the instructor of Company Analysis, a new course introduced last year that is being taught in the current MBA term at Hitotsubashi ICS.
Prof. Yamaoka's brings with him an invaluable twenty years of hands-on professional experience in the financial industry as a banker, an investment analyst, and an asset manager. Nonetheless his Company Analysis course is not focused on quantitative studies as much as it is on intelligent interactions between students and high-level key corporate decision-makers. For this reason, Company Analysis is taught only in the 4th term of the Hitotsubashi ICS MBA program, after our students have acquired the "hardcore skills" from the more conceptual and theoretical courses in the earlier part of their academic year.
The distinctive feature of the Company Analysis course at Hitotsubashi ICS is in its design. Corporate guest speakers mostly dominate the course. It is not uncommon to see lively interactions and debates between the students and high-level management that Prof. Yamaoka invites from international Japanese corporate giants, such as Mitsubishi Estate, Kirin, Benesse and Shiseido. For the most part of the course these C-level executives, backed by a vast experience of being interviewed by journalists, analysts and stakeholders, are drilled and quizzed by students about the companies that they run. The objective of this exercise is to help the students master what Prof. Yamaoka considers to be a very important skill in analyzing companies, i.e. identifying and collecting corporate information that are not available through public sources, such as financials statements or corporate websites or even analysts' reports, by asking the well-informed questions directly to key decision-makers. Naturally, much information gathering and planning need to take place before these interviews. Through this intensive pre-interview preparation, students will already begin to develop the sense and thought processes of high-level management that will help them to confidently interact with their executive interviewees.
Career Background
Prof. Yamaoka was formerly a vice president of Capital International Research Inc. (CIRI), a research arm of one of the world's largest institutional investors, Capital Group Companies. Through his career here, he accumulated both analytical expertise and direct relationship with the top management of Japan's leading companies and industry experts that form the foundation of his Company Analysis course at Hitotsubashi ICS. Prof. Yamaoka has also worked at the Industrial Bank of Japan (now a part of Mizuho Financial Group) and at IBJ's subsidiary, IBJNW Asset Management Co. (now DIAM Co.). He received his MBA at Stanford.
In addition to his role at Hitotsubashi ICS, Prof. Yamaoka runs Yamaoka & Co., his own asset management and consulting firm, and is involved in a variety of corporate advisory and research activities.
