Greg Rose ‘80 is recently retired from a career in international business, living in Tokyo —a place he’s called home for 40 years—and he credits his ability to succeed to a simple skill.
He calls himself a dot connector.
“If I’m working on a problem, the first thought I’ll have is who can help me solve this?” Rose said. “Naturally, you should be tapping into human capital. Based on the people you’ve met and worked with, you are always one or two calls away from a solution.”
Rose came to Wabash with curiosity and planned to be a doctor until a chemistry class with Professor Ed Haenisch derailed those plans.
He discovered interest in other topics. The conversations he was having with legendary professors like Ben Rogge, Steve Schmutte, Eric Dean, and Bill Placher were intriguing, so he decided to major in economics and French.
How he got himself into business is a bit more straightforward.
“It was an entirely rational decision,” said the native of New Castle, Indiana. “I wound up getting a job in business because I didn’t know what else to do and I needed to support myself.”
He started connecting the dots in his job search simply and directly, Rose wrote scores of letters to Wabash alumni seeking insight and opportunity. One responded and helped him secure a position in the human resources department at Baxter, Inc., a multinational healthcare company, where his analytics background in economics came in handy.
Rose advanced internally and took on a role as a business planning analyst with the head of Baxter’s Americas and Pacific healthcare and divisions, spending a majority of his time in Latin America and Japan.
Eventually, as business interests shifted focus to Japan, he was asked to permanently reside in Tokyo in 1984 and serve as a liaison between Baxter’s U.S. and Japanese teams. With plenty of focus on the Japanese market in the 1980s, his timing was nearly perfect.
“It was a whole confluence of factors and the next thing you know, I’m in Japan in the healthcare industry,” he said. “I’m 27 years old, I’m a little scared, but I think I can do this.”
Even though a change of focus at Baxter made Rose’s position less appealing, he discovered along the way that he had picked up useful experience in Japan working with senior-level management teams.
“Almost all of my experience was in Japan,” he said. “I had the ability to talk to both sides. Every day was a new strategy. Life takes you someplace, and that’s where it took me.”
Rose left Baxter and along with a Japanese partner in 1988, co-founded the Chicago Tokyo Group, Inc., a firm that helped foreign businesses gain entry into Japanese markets. His experience at Baxter had him well positioned to help other corporations find success.
“My early experience and my intellectual curiosity led me to start the business,” he said. “There was a perception that the barriers to entry were high in Japan. To me, it was the only thing I knew. I’d been doing this work every day, so I could solve those problems.”
Looking back on a 40-year career based in Tokyo, the question was simple: what made him stay?
“It’s like any job, you become captive to your knowledge base,” he said. “l have a specialized, and somewhat narrow, skill set. I know way more about regulatory approval and reimbursement of Japanese medical and pharmaceutical products than most Japanese people do and I can explain it in a common sense way. In a certain context, I’m a welcome addition to the conversation.
“I have the confidence that I could solve nearly every problem given enough time and the right library,” he continued. “Some of that was my upbringing, but Wabash played a big part in that, too. What I got from Wabash was infinitely better for my business career than my graduate studies.”
