Ryosuke (Reo) WATANABE, Ph.D.

Reo is a scholar-practitioner of leadership development. He believes anyone can exercise leadership to make a meaningful life and a better world. He is also convinced leadership can be learned and therefore should be taught properly and efficiently. His passion is to strengthen world peace by promoting leadership not only at an individual level but also at a systemic level. He teaches adaptive leadership using the case-in-point method and offers executive training both in the United States and Japan. His research focuses on the intersection of adaptive leadership and adult development. He is a certified Reliable Subject-Object Interview Scorer and a certified Global Leadership Profile Coach. He is also a trained facilitator of the Immunity to Change and the case-in-point pedagogy of adaptive leadership.

Reo has extensive leadership experience in both nonprofit and for-profit organizations. He is one of the founding members of the International College of Liberal Arts (iCLA) in Japan. iCLA was established in Yamanashi in 2015 to educate future global leaders from Japan through an innovative liberal arts curriculum with a world-class Japan Studies Program.  

Before iCLA, he was Research Associate in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and conducted a comparative analysis of leadership development between the United States and Japan.

In 2001 he founded a digital marketing firm, Dentsu Razorfish (originally named Digital Palette) in Japan, and had served as Chief Executive Officer for nine years. During the period, he formed a capital alliance with Razorfish in the United States and served on the Razorfish global leadership team for three years. He also served on the Board of Directors of Cyber Communications, the largest internet media agency in Japan, and Fractalist China, a leading mobile marketing company in China.

Reo holds Ph.D. in Leadership Studies from the University of San Diego, M.P.A. in Leadership from Harvard Kennedy School, M.B.A. in Marketing Management from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and B.A. in Economics from Hitotsubashi University in Japan.