Stories

January 23, 2026

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In the modern corporate landscape, it is common to see executives receive massive bonuses even as their companies face financial turmoil. Haruka Nishimatsu, the former head of Japan Airlines, famously broke this cycle by putting his employees’ security before his own wealth. He recognized that a company is only as strong as the people who keep it running every day.

When the airline faced billions in debt and the threat of bankruptcy, Nishimatsu decided to slash his own salary to just $90,000. This move ensured that he was feeling the same economic pressure as the frontline workers he led. His choice was a profound statement that leadership is a responsibility to others rather than a path to personal enrichment.

Image Source: NBC News

Leading by Example Through Shared Sacrifice

Nishimatsu discarded the traditional perks of his high-ranking position to remain grounded with his workforce. He traded a private limousine for the city bus and waited in line for lunch at the staff cafeteria.

These daily actions removed the social distance that typically separates a CEO from the rest of the office. By working at a regular desk in an open-plan room, he made himself accessible to everyone in the building.

Image Source: The Wall Street Journal

Prioritizing People Over Short-Term Profits

During the 2009 financial crisis, Nishimatsu refused to use mass layoffs as a quick fix for the company’s rising debt. He understood that protecting the livelihoods of his staff was more important than protecting the executive payroll.

This commitment to job security built a deep sense of trust and loyalty throughout the entire organization. His strategy proved that a business can navigate a crisis without ever abandoning its moral compass.

Image Source: The Wall Street Journal

The True Source of Professional Respect

Nishimatsu demonstrated that real authority is earned through character and shared experience rather than a fancy title. He did not need a corner office or a massive paycheck to command the respect of his pilots and flight attendants.

His influence came from the fact that he stood right beside them when the company was struggling. This style of leadership serves as a timeless reminder of what it means to be a true steward of a brand.

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News

29-Year-Old Wedding Guitarist Made A Pandemic Pivot To Real Estate Earns $245K A Year

The best part is that playing weddings “doesn’t even feel like working. We’re just partying.” Moses Lin told CNBC Make It’s Millennial Money series.

Early in Lin’s career in 2016, he played at a coffee shop for three hours and got $3 tips. Today, his work takes him from New York to Hawaii, even to Cancun, and earns $175,000 before tips.

In the last two years, Lin has invested most of his wedding earnings into real estate.

Before becoming a real estate investor, Lin left college with just one semester left to pursue music full-time back in 2017. Several months later, Disney saw his YouTube videos and hired him to play in Disneyland’s hotels and restaurants. He took the job and decided he was never going back to college.

In the same year, Lin played a friend’s wedding as a favor and enjoyed it. He then charged $250 for his first wedding booking. After learning that wedding musician rates are $1200, he doubled his prices. Despite raising his rates, clients kept coming. Now, he charges $4,000 to $6,000 per wedding, depending on when the couple wants him to play. 

Lin became interested in real estate investing in 2014 and bought his first property in May 2020 as a “pandemic pivot” when Covid restrictions slowed his wedding gigs. He found a 4-bedroom house for $120,000 online and put down 20% plus $10,000 to renovate. His wedding earnings helped him buy a $40,000 home in Little Rock, including closing costs.

He rented the house for $1,425 and quickly found a tenant. He liked the process so much that he decided to buy a second property before the end of the year.

Today, Lin owns and rents out four properties in Little Rock. Lin didn’t turn a profit on his rental properties in 2021, but is in it for the long haul.

His goal with real estate is to get to a point where the passive income from his rentals pays all of his bills.

Lin pays a property manager to handle things on the ground, “so I’m able to focus 100% of my attention on weddings [and] on music, and real estate just makes money on the side.” he tells CNBC, “My whole master business plan is make money in weddings, dump it into real estate and let that grow itself.”

CONNECT WITH MOSES LIN

Instagram: instagram.com/moseslinmusic
Website: moseslinmusic.com

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GGV Capital’s Jenny Lee: From Jet Engineer To One Of World’s Best Venture Capitalists

Recognized as one of the world’s top 100 venture capitalists by Forbes for 11 years in a row, Singaporean venture capitalist Jenny Lee stayed in her hometown to raise money for four new funds launched by her firm GGV Capital at the height of the pandemic in 2020. 

For four months, according to Forbes, the veteran VC barely slept as she made 250 zoom calls and remotely raised $2.5 billion from investors around the world. Lee and her team raised the most capital in GGV’s 22-year history, boosting assets by 27% to $9.2 billion. 

Long before she became one of Asia’s most powerful businesswomen, she earned a bachelor’s and master’s in Electrical Engineering at Cornell in 1995. She became an aviation engineer at Singapore’s ST Aerospace, where she modified F-16 fighter planes.

In 2001, the company sent Lee to attend Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management where she earned an M.B.A., but she had wanted to be a venture capitalist for a long time, so she quit her job that same year to follow her hidden passion.

Lee paid ST Aerospace $300,000 for not finishing the 11-year scholarship bond that paid for her bachelor’s, master’s, and M.B.A., but she has no regrets. For her, it was the best move.

She got her start as a venture capitalist at Morgan Stanley and Jafco Asia, but she made her name in China after joining GGV to create its office there in 2005. One of Lee’s more successful discoveries was the mobile phone maker Xiaomi before it had sold its first handphone.

Today, Lee is one of GGV’s top-tier managing partners along with Singaporean Jixun Foo, an early Grab investor. Hans Tung, who’s been on the Midas List 11 times. And VCs who have U.S. investment, industrial, and entrepreneurial expertise.

GGV’s 354 firms are balanced between Asia-Pacific and the Americas (GGV claims its investments include more than 85 unicorns). With the U.S. having more investments, at roughly 130, and 77 in China.

The company’s assets under management have expanded more than 50 times since its founding in 2000.

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Netflix’s Star-studded Series Avatar: The Last Airbender Includes George Takei, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Arden Cho, Danny Pudi

More actors have joined the cast of Netflix’s live-action version of “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” including George Takei, Utkarsh Ambudkar from the sitcom “Ghosts,” Arden Cho from Partner Tracks, and Danny Pudi from the comedy series “Mythic Quest.”

Avatar: The Last Airbender unites the “four nations”: Water Tribe, Earth Kingdom, Fire Nation, and Air Nomads with a diverse representation of Asian and Indigenous talent.

Star Trek’s Takei voices Koh, an ancient predatory spirit. Cho, Ambudkar, and Pudi all portray Earth Kingdom characters, with Cho as June, a vicious bounty hunter; Ambudkar as King Bumi, the elderly and mercurial king of Omashu; and Pudi as the mechanist, an eccentric inventor and engineer raising his kid in a war-torn country.

Cast members include Gordon Cormier as Aang, Kiawentiio as Katara, Ian Ousley as Sokka, Dallas Liu as Zuko, Elizabeth Yu as Azula, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee as Iroh, and Daniel Dae Kim as Fire Lord Ozai.

Executive produced by showrunner Albert Kim, Rideback’s Dan Lin and Lindsey Liberatore, and Michael Goi, “Avatar: The Last Airbender” is a live-action version of the animated Nickelodeon series of the same name. Directors include Goi, co-executive producer Roseanne Liang, Jabbar Raisani, and Jet Wilkinson.

Kim tells Netflix that the live-action adaptation creates “a chance to showcase Asian and Indigenous characters as living, breathing people. Not just in a cartoon, but in a world that truly exists, very similar to the one we live in.”

 

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Constance Wu On Surviving Twitter, Producer’s Sexual Assault On Her New Memoir

Constance Wu is opening up about her time on “Fresh Off the Boat” and saying that a senior producer of the 2015–2020 ABC sitcom sexually harassed her.

She tells The New York Times about a producer’s “controlling behaviors” in her memoir Making a Scene. “Fresh Off the Boat was my first-ever TV show. I was thrown into this world,” she added, “I don’t have parents in the industry. And because I was 30, people thought I knew what I was doing. It made me paranoid and embarrassed.” 

Wu also told The Atlantic she hadn’t spoken about this before out of fear of repercussions. “I kept my mouth shut for a really long time about a lot of sexual harassment and intimidation that I received the first two seasons of the show,” Wu said. 

Once the show got successful after two seasons, she was able to say “no” to the producer’s harassment and intimidation. And, so she thought: ‘You know what? I handled it, nobody has to know, I don’t have to stain this Asian American producer’s reputation. I don’t have to stain the reputation of the show.”

The actress addressed the infamous tweet in spring 2019 when ABC renewed another season of the sitcom. “I was punished for being ungrateful,” she said. Wu publicly apologized, but she received backlash. 

She then sought psychiatric help and quit social media for three years. Wu had started writing a book back in 2016 but had lost momentum.

In the fall of 2019, she went back to work at “Fresh Off the Boat”, the final season, where she apologized to her colleagues in person.

The next year, the world stopped due to the pandemic. And she finished the book she was writing. In her memoir, Wu talks about how she felt alone, how racism affected her career, and how she’s moving on.

“I try not to make myself out to be a hero,” Ms. Wu told NYT. “I try to make myself out to be a pretty normal person who has flaws like everybody else. I’m not really into the actor memoir where it’s like, ‘I overcame the odds, and I’m this person who was humble and just kept working. I was the victim.’ It’s less black and white than simply victim and perpetrator.”