Harry A. Hill

Harry A. Hill is an entrepreneur, business leader, investor, author, and lifelong martial artist who has spent more than four decades building businesses, brands, and leaders in Japan. His career combines hands-on operating leadership, entrepreneurship and M&A, the creation of iconic consumer products, and leadership across industry, nonprofit, and U.S.-Japan institutions.

At the center of Harry's approach are three ideas: organizations must continually evolve; everybody matters; and leaders create the greatest impact when they make customers and their people the heroes rather than themselves.

He has applied those principles while building high-performance organizations, creating household-name products, developing businesses with transferable enterprise value, and helping teams connect demanding performance goals with a genuine sense of purpose.

Harry believes high performance and purpose reinforce one another. Strong organizations set demanding expectations and hold people accountable, but they also help people understand why their work matters and how their contribution connects to something larger than themselves.

One of his core leadership principles is simple: Everybody matters. People are most engaged when they feel valued, see the difference their work makes, and understand the role they play in the success of the organization. Fair compensation is essential, but compensation alone is temporary. A sense of purpose can continue motivating people long after payday.

For Harry, the leader's job is not to be the hero. It is to create an environment in which other people can succeed, grow, contribute, and become proud of what they are building together. When purpose, accountability, and performance reinforce each other, organizations become both more human and more powerful.

Harry is frequently asked to speak and teach about marketing, brand building, and how to create hit products. During his leadership of Oak Lawn Marketing / Shop Japan, products including Billy's Boot Camp, Wonder Core, and Leg Magic became widely recognized household names in Japan.

Underlying those successes is a marketing principle Harry has long taught: make the customer the hero - not the product and not the brand. Customers are rarely interested in a product simply for what it is; they respond to what it can help them become, accomplish, experience, or change.

Harry sees a direct connection between marketing and leadership. Effective marketing begins by understanding the customer. Effective leadership begins by understanding people. In both cases, the objective is to create value for others rather than make the company, product, brand, or leader the center of the story.

Harry helped build and lead Oak Lawn Marketing / Shop Japan to approximately ¥70 billion in annual revenue and around 1,000 employees at peak scale. His experience spans direct marketing, consumer products, organizational growth, entrepreneurship, investment, and the challenge of sustaining performance while markets, media, technology, and consumer behavior evolve.

A recurring theme in his entrepreneurial career has been building organizations and capabilities that create value beyond the founder. His first company, SGI Japan, was built and sold. H&R Consultants was also built and subsequently sold. Oak Lawn Marketing's growth culminated in a major strategic transaction with NTT DOCOMO in 2009. More recently, Harry co-founded DataWise within Oak Lawn Marketing; the business was later separated and successfully sold.

These experiences give Harry a practical perspective on the full entrepreneurial cycle: identifying an opportunity, creating the business, building teams and capabilities, scaling performance, institutionalizing value, and ultimately navigating a successful ownership transition.

Evolve or regress. There is no middle ground.

Harry believes organizations cannot truly stand still. Markets change. Customers change. Technology changes. Employees and society change. An organization that focuses only on preserving what made it successful will eventually fall behind.

Transformation, therefore, is not an emergency program for organizations in trouble. It is a permanent responsibility of leadership. The best time to challenge a business model, culture, or established way of working is often while the organization is still successful - before declining performance makes change unavoidable.

The principle applies equally to leaders themselves. Leaders who expect their organizations to evolve must be willing to keep learning, accept discomfort, experiment, recover from mistakes, and sometimes let go of approaches that contributed to past success.

Harry remains actively engaged in business rather than speaking about leadership only from past experience. He continues to serve on the board of Oak Lawn Marketing and is involved with two operating companies in Japan.

Better-U operates the UFC Gym business in Japan, where Harry is actively involved in building and expanding the organization. U-H-M-Y is a growing social-services company providing services and support for people with disabilities in Japan; Harry serves on the board and as an advisor, helping to oversee its development and growth.

These roles keep him close to the realities facing today's leaders: recruiting and developing people, building culture, setting performance expectations, allocating capital, managing growth, and adapting as circumstances change.

Harry has long believed that leadership extends beyond the company one happens to lead. His leadership roles have spanned industry, the international business community, nonprofit organizations, and the U.S.-Japan relationship. (The full table of organisations and roles is held in this speaker's attributes.)

Harry's book, Fighter: A Guide to Life and Business, brings together lessons from decades in business and martial arts. A 5th-degree black belt in Shorinji Kempo and a certified kickboxing coach, Harry has learned that life and leadership inevitably put us into fights we did not necessarily choose.

The objective is not to avoid adversity, but to prepare for it and respond well: remain composed under pressure, adapt to what is actually happening, learn from setbacks, recover, and return ready for the next round. The martial-arts dimension of Harry's work is not a metaphor added to his business story; it is a discipline he has practiced for decades and continues to teach.