Chief Change Officer - From Whiskey to Wi-Fi: Tabist CEO Ryota Tanozaki's Career of Bold Transitions

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

Ryota Tanozaki began his career selling shochu at Suntory. Fast forward 20 years, and he’s now the President and CEO of Tabist (formerly OYO Japan), leading the tech revolution for over 90,000 Japanese hotels. His impressive resume includes roles as Strategy Consultant at BearingPoint, Product Manager at Hakuhodo Consulting, General Manager at Transcosmos, and leadership positions at Facebook as Head of Instagram and Vertical Industry. A seasoned executive, Ryota also shares his expertise as a part-time instructor at Globis University. We first connected during our Executive MBA at Chicago Booth (2013–2015), and I’m thrilled to share his incredible journey. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Navigating the Storm “Three months into my role at Tavist, COVID hit. I had to lead a restructuring—redefining the organization, renegotiating contracts, and crafting a new mission, vision, and strategy. Perseverance became not just a word but a lifeline.” Adapting to Change “COVID brought challenges I couldn’t foresee, yet it became a proving ground. Four years later, I’m still here, knowing that persistence shapes both leaders and the organizations they guide.” When Purpose Pays Better Than Paychecks “Our team can’t match the salaries of big tech giants, but what we offer is purpose. By sharing our mission—empowering small and medium-sized hotels in rural Japan through technology—we create a connection that resonates deeply with our people.” Walking the Talk: When Leaders Roll Up Their Sleeves “A leader who pitches directly to clients? Now that’s commitment. By personally visiting rural cities and convincing potential partners, I showed my team that execution starts at the top. If I can do it, they’re inspired to follow suit—and it makes the mission real for everyone involved.” _________________________ Connect with us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Ryota Tanozaki ______________________ Chief Change Officer: Make Change Ambitiously. Experiential Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives Global Top 3% Podcast on Listen Notes World's #1 Career Podcast on Apple Top 1: US, CA, MX, IE, HU, AT, CH, FI, JP 3+ Millions Downloads 80+ Countries

Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Oshu is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. We fly all the way from US to Tokyo, Japan. I've always felt a special connection to Japan. I've always felt a special connection to Japan. My first trip overseas with my family took us to Osaka, Nagoya, and Tokyo when I was just 9 years old. Later, during my first year at Yale MBA, I joined the first ever study trip to Japan, where 15 of us explored Japan's business culture, visiting companies like Shiseido, Toyota,

NTT DoCoMo, and the Japanese government, including the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. I even wrote a paper about the Japanese economy and banking industry after the trip. Between 2017 and 2019, I've been involved in Act-Tac Japan, an international conference on the future of education technology, where I've been featured as a speaker for three years. As a business professional, I'm always amazed by Japan's culture of craftsmanship and its blend of tradition with modernization. And as a traveler, I can't get enough of the Japanese hospitality. In this episode, I'm talking with Ryota Tanosaki, the president and CEO of Tapest, who's innovating the Japanese hospitality industry.

Ryota and I were MBA classmates at Chicago Booth. Since graduation, he's faced some fascinating, yet unexpected career transitions. For those unfamiliar, Tabist, originally part of a Joy venture with Softbank in 2019, with the headquarters in India. It was rebranded and localized as Tabist around 2022. With Ryota stepping up as the CEO,

Tappist means truffle in Japanese. As you can imagine, as successful as his appointment sounded, this appointment came during a very challenging time. Post-vulnern of the Tokyo Olympics game and the COVID situation, both of which rocked the truffle industry. Over the next 20 minutes, Ryota will share not only his own career transformation,

also how tapas has evolved during an incredibly challenging period for truffle. I'll attach the press release about the company's background in a show notes for those interested. Without further ado, let's welcome Ryota Tanosaki. I want to share my career and after that maybe you will ask some of the details for transition timing. Yeah first after college and I joined Tantori, a beer and whiskey manufacturer, sales and marketing, especially. After a five-year journey at Tantori, I decided to move toward Madagascar consulting firm because I wanted to cultivate not just sales and marketing capability, but also strategy building capability and also

executing it. After that I joined several management consulting firms and spent around 12 years. After that I decided to pursue executive MBA in Singapore at the Chicago booth. After coming back from Singapore to Japan, I got an opportunity to manage e-commerce business under BTO company called Transcosmos. After working for Transcosmos for 10 months, at the moment, FaZe Tech reached out to me, why don't you become a head of the client solution manager at Facebook Japan? So that position is like playing a role of the COO at Facebook Japan.

So collaborating with a country manager to develop strategy and then execute strategy, so that kind of role. collaborating with a country manager to develop strategy and then execute a strategy. So that kind of role. And then I spent four years at Japan. I translated from Facebook to OYO Hotels. And then I changed the name from OYO Japan to TARVEST. So I have been here for four years at Tartist. So that's my career.

When I was starting out, a lot of my friends heading off to business school with big dreams of becoming CEO one day. The plan always seemed pretty straightforward. Get an MBA first, then join one of the biggest consulting firm, McKinsey, BZG to tackle a bunch of business challenges across different industries.

Then maybe at some point, they launch their own business or start claiming corporate ladder somewhere big, become the CEO, CFO, CEO somewhere. For them, MBA first, consulting next. But you kind of flipped the script a bit. You spent five years in one of the biggest corporations in Japan in a functional role in sales and marketing.

Then went into management consulting and stayed there for over a decade. Later, pursued MBA to get, I would say some kind of extra edge. Now, before we jump into your experiences at Tapest, I'm really curious about your consulting days. Could you tell us about one of those projects? about your consulting days. Could you tell us about one of those projects? Maybe one that stands out as particularly memorable,

or that gave you some deep insights? One of the memorable projects that I experienced was at Frontier Management Inc., a Tandara consulting firm. That project, I played a role of the COO, department store located in a very rural area in Japan. Because of declining population in the rural city, they were struggling to increase revenue. Because they wanted to turn around their business, they invested a lot of money and then lent a lot of money from banks to build new shopping mall next to their existing department store. Frontier management was hired by biggest bank, biggest lender to the company to turn around the company. That project was quite challenging.

However, it was quite fulfilling because it was the first moment where I not just built a strategy, but also execute a strategy with employees of that company. So at that moment I learned. So building strategy is totally different. Executing strategy. So in order for us to execute strategy as a manager, as a leader, you have to always consider people because unless people are engaged with strategy and motivated to execute a strategy, company cannot move forward.

I spent two years with you at Chicago Booth as classmate, yet I've never asked you the next question. I'm going to ask you now, and you give me your honest answer. I'm going to ask you now, and you give me your honest answer. What actually triggered you to get an MBA at Chicago Booth at that point in time? Frankly speaking, at that moment when I was engaged with that project at the Apprentice Management and at the Department Store, I felt concerned that all my career could last in a rural city and my entire career ends. So that was my concern at the moment. I started thinking, why don't I I don't know. Never like what I experienced so far.

Globally. Gradually thinking I wanna challenge more. I wanna challenge not just in domestic cities in Japan, but also globally. And then I consulted with my boss, the president of the foreign care management about the opportunity to work globally. At some moment, my boss was considering

to develop the office in Singapore. They provided me with the opportunity to start developing the global office in Singapore. Of course, I grabbed that kind of opportunity. But at the same time, I wanted to pursue MBA concurrently because I wanted to up the corporate ladder and I wanted to acquire business networks outside Japan. Japan. Ryota, as you were sharing your story, I did a quick Google search.

Actually, three searches in about 10 seconds. I typed in change career at 30. I got about 2 billion results. Then I searched change career at 40. I got over 1 billion results. Finally, I entered Change career at 50. I found over 1.5 billion results.

So altogether, roughly 4.5 billion results in 10 seconds about change career. I haven't done any other keyword searches. I'm sure if I go deeper, I will find more interesting insights. So what does this search mean? It shows that at certain stages of our lives, at a certain age, we are either compelled or forced to change careers, or we have a strong desire for a change. In today's job market, I would argue that we should embrace this change and be prepared to initiate the change on our own terms. In your case, you felt insecure. Some might call this a midlife crisis. I prefer to see it as a positive sense of crisis or a constructive insecurity.

Why is it positive? Because feeling insecure drives you to take action. It pushes you to improve your security and increase your chances. You fight for better job prospects. You move out of your country. You move out of your comfort zone. You went for an MBA degree. You network with people from different industries and countries.

This expands not only your horizons, but also your opportunities, turning your sense of insecurity into a positive force in your life. Would you agree with my assessment? Yes. At Frontier Management, I realized that I was quite excited about building teams and building business, not just building the great strategy and letting clients execute it. So that was my transition moment. It was quite natural for me to transit from consulting world to a conflict world.

That moment, social digital marketing was quite important for corporations to accelerate their growth. And also the e-commerce platform was prevalent like Shopify and others. I just considered, okay, I have to embed more technical skills and digital experiences through my career. So I chose Brand Cosmos and then Facebook. So that's my intention at the moment. You talk a lot about business theology that has been a major theme in your career life. Would you say you are equally strategic about every career move you've made so far?

But at the France Ghost Box, it was not strategic, right? Because it was only for 10 months, and unfortunately I decided to move toward a patient. Because in reality, before joining Francecosmos, I thought my role could be to build new e-commerce companies in Japan, but the reality was that I wanted to manage a port of companies, e-commerce companies, located in Southeast Asia. Because Transcom was board a variety of e-commerce companies located in Southeast Asia, so they were struggling and then decided to divest some of them. So that was totally different from my expectation. So I just started looking for another opportunity.

So that was not my intention, but maybe it was strategic, but it was unfortunate for both of me as well as Praskosmos. How do you handle both sackbacks and successes? People looking at your career might say, wow, you're incredibly successful. But we all know that behind every success, there are tons of challenges you've overcome. In fact, a lot, a lot of challenges, a lot, a lot of setbacks to support one instance of success. What is your philosophy for managing both the ups and the downs? Yeah, that great question.

Participation is quite important. At the France Cosmos, what I expected was totally different. I pursued a different journey just after 10 months of work at the Transcosmos. But I always think if you want to build something great, or if you want to make a great thing, perseverance is quite important. So what you're suggesting is managing both the highs and the lows, the setbacks and successes really comes down to perseverance, right? I remember when you moved from Facebook or Meta to Tapest,

which was called OYO, originally from India, a travel tech company. That was a fairly tough period of time. It was no joke. Tell me, how did you tap into your perseverance to navigate the company through the early days of COVID, then the Tokyo Olympics, post-Bowman, and then now back to what we might call normal? Three months after I joined Tavis, that I placed COVID, and then I had to lead restructurings.

Though in terms of organization, in terms of the contract with customers, at the same time I've had to build new mission, vision, and strategy at the moment, our investors, especially the SBK, KSOC Bank, Telecom Corporation, decided to make local executive leadership, which is me, for years in the past. 4 years had passed. So I didn't expect I continued to work for Tavist for such a long time because COVID lasted for 3 years, right? It was quite tough, but I always believed that perseverance is quite important for leaders to build a great company or make a significant impact, make

a significant and positive impact on society. I'm here right now. You use the word perseverance, and often leaders like to use an out of the box word, resilience. Resilience. I totally get the concept as I've had to practice resilience myself over many years. But as a company leader, how do you impart this mindset, this resilience to your team? I'm not talking about operations or technology resilience. I'm talking about people, the human beings around you. You might be incredibly resilient yourself, but if your team doesn't share that sense of resilience, it won't be reflected in the team, in the culture as a whole.

Then the word resilience would just be a buzzword. So what's your approach to fostering resilience when it comes to building and managing your team? Yeah, with this quite a challenging situation, what I did was mainly three things. The first one is I always shared our mission and vision with team members in terms of compensation. So we are not that great in comparison to Facebook, Google, Amazon, you name it, it's a global company. At the same time, we have to, so as a leader, continue to motivate them to work for a startup, so like Tarvist. So in order for us to do that, we have to give them another reason

about why they continue to work for Tarvist or continue to work for a startup. So one of the reasons is mission and vision. So our mission is to provide and quite engaged with our people. When our team members visit rural cities and visit some of the local, rural hotels, they cannot integrate technology with their location. They see that kind of situation in reality. If we can provide technology with them, they can thrive with less people.

They also have a difficulty of hiring people because in Japan, it's facing the declining population, right? It's very big huge issue of labor resources. They paint the situation in a real life. They embrace that kind of mission into their heart and blood. They are motivated to work for Tavis. So that's about the intrinsic motivation, the sense of mission, the sense of fiction.

What else? Secondly, the important thing is to provide a strategy, clear strategy. They also are quite smart. So we have to let them understand why we can win, why we can realize our mission. So what kind of things are quite different against competitors? So we have to find out true problems our clients face, and we have to be focused on that kind of problem. And then we have to provide a strategy, shared strategy with stakeholders, of course, including the employees. What you call the strategy, I would say is a pathway.

You, or the investors, have the vision, you execute it. But the people around you, they follow you. So in order to follow you, yes, they have a reason, that intrinsic motivation you've mentioned, but then you tell them, well, that's how we're going to do it. You call the strategy, I call it pathway. Then you engage stakeholders, the employees, of course, one of them, investors, customers, customers, is a multi-stakeholder development and management process. What's your third thing? And the third thing is the leader, big by examples.

One of the strategies is to acquire, of course, acquire many partners, partner hotels and real estate. I quite often visit local cities to meet some of the potential clients. And then I myself grabbed several facilities through teaching to them why we are here and how we can help them thrive in the rural city. So then they gradually think, okay, Ryota did that. Why don't we do the same thing with this strategy? They could be convinced more. So mission vision and strategy and execution by leader are quite important for a startup to get their employees to be motivated. Yes, that is leadership, by example.

I would also like to see this as you getting closer to your customer. You really want to learn about the situation, the problems, and then you show to your staff how you win accounts, how you solve problems. If they're smart enough, they observe how you do it. And then they follow. They take some of your best insights, the best lessons, and then execute. It's also a kind of quality management so that you can train up your staff to deliver.

management so that you can train up your staff to deliver. Let's extend on this topic of leadership, by example. Leader, one kind of leader, which I admire, is called surfing leader. You lead by surfing. Another kind is you lead by coaching. So some of the best leaders I've worked for in my career life, they coach me on the side, make me become a better person, better leader. Now I know that outside of office work, you teach marketing, social media strategy at one of the business schools in Japan. Share with me about your teaching experience as a faculty member.

Yes, I'm teaching at Globally University Marketing and Strategy. My customers, so my students, come from a variety of Japanese and very established corporations. My career vision is to realize potential of people. Leading by example is quite important but you cannot do everything. You have to create a great team. So training, educating and nurturing them is also quite important not just at Globist, but at Tarbist. That's the reason why I teach not just at Globist at university, but also at Tarbist as well.

Leaders are like coaches, right? They're always helping others to learn and grow. Speaking of which, are there any books or resources that really changed the game for you? Maybe something you recommend to our listeners to help inspire them just as much as it did for you? Yeah, yeah, two books that I want to encourage people to read, especially these people to read. So first book is from classic books of innovateimer, written by Clay Lee Stamson. The reason why I chose this book is because it is quite transformative for me, because even the products are focused on small and medium-sized customers, can win over the great

products of a great company with large corporations. So that is quite counterintuitive, but that's happening. So that kind of concept still is distilled in the Tavist strategy. I believe we are now, orchestra providing our technology to small and medium sized hotel and ryokan. But eventually our products will permeate not just in small and medium sized company, but also large corporations. So that kind of paradigm

shit has already started. The other book is the recent book, but I learned a lot because it's first time for me to build a company and run a startup at Carpist, but I learned a lot of things from this book. So, Hike was handbagged, written by Eli Gil. He is a famous investor in Silicon Valley. And he discussed with several entrepreneurs and executives about how to run a startup, how to operate a startup, how to build a corporation. So I learned a lot from this book. So especially, uh, one of the things that I exactly did based on this book was to

write down the note about how to read Ryota. I haven't actually read the book High Growth Handbook myself, but what we just said reminds me of something I do fairly often. I'm not big on texting or using social media because I prefer writing things down by hand. There's something about the process of writing. It involves a lot of thinking, reflecting, and analyzing. By the time I've written something out, I've already worked through a lot of the information in my head. And I also find that, even if I haven't figured out the problem, this process of writing, as I'm doing it, the answer comes through more naturally. Speaking of which, remember in our leadership capital class taught by Linda Ginzel, the

social psychologist at Chicago Booth, she talked about how our brains can trick us into rationalizing or justifying our thoughts too quickly. She suggested that to think clearly, we should write things down, not just to type it out, actually write it down by hand in its rawest form. That way, you can come back to it later, maybe a day or even a week later, and see exactly what you were thinking at that time.

It really helps you work through your ideas and find solutions. Clayton Pritchinson. Yes, he's been my favorite author for the longest time. Sadly, he passed away around the start of COVID. That book you mentioned, The Innovator's Dilemma, is absolutely incredible. But there's another one of his that I love,

which is How Will You Measure Your Life? I highly recommend it to all my listeners, no matter what role you're in or what job you're doing. Anyways, thank you so much for your time today, Ryota. I'm really looking forward to our next conversation. I hope it won't be over a virtual setup next time. Instead, let's aim to be sitting next to each other, enjoying some beer and good food in Tokyo. Thanks again. Thank you, Liz. I quite enjoyed it.

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.