May 28, 2025
It used to be that a good career meant 40 years of showing up to the same job, day after day, before collecting your gold watch and retiring. Those days are no more.
Consider the incredible trajectory of Rika Nakazawa – a leader who has made constant growth her mantra, and evolution her MO. After growing up in Japan, and graduating from Princeton, she spent time with a roll-call of the most impactful corporations of the budding 21st Century (Accenture, Nvidia, Sony) before taking on her current role as Chief of Commercial Innovation at the Japanese telecom giant, NTT.
In Rika’s case, that title is more than just a buzzword: innovation is the central pillar of her world, and it runs through everything she does. Rika is also an author – her best-selling book, Dear Chairwoman, collects the testimonies of some of the most powerful women working at board level today – and an influential seed investor.
In this far-ranging conversation, Rika brings us step by step through her remarkable journey. We see how a childhood spent moving between two distinct cultures prepared her for a lifetime of adaptation at the heart of an always-shifting industry. Somewhere along the way, she arrived at the inspiring ethos that still guides her today. Who cares about a gold watch anyway?
