# Paul Hardisty -  Former CEO, Adidas Japan

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/japan-s-top-business-interviews-podcast-by-dale-carnegie-training-tokyo-japan-294627/paul-hardisty-former-ceo-adidas-japan.md
Podcast: [Japan's Top Business Interviews Podcast By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan](https://stenobird.com/podcast/japan-s-top-business-interviews-podcast-by-dale-carnegie-training-tokyo-japan-294627)
Published: 2026-02-21T00:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://japanstopbusinessinterviews.libsyn.com/paul-hardisty-former-ceo-adidas-japan
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/japanstopbusinessinterviews/Paul_Hardisty.m4a?dest-id=2099903
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Duration seconds: 3262

## Resource

"The trust part is very important." "Change was a dirty word." "Anything controversial was normally me." "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity." Paul Hardisty is a finance-trained executive (CPA) who began his career in Melbourne and became CFO of a group of fashion brands across Australia and New Zealand, including Davenport, with licensing and distribution experience across brands such as Calvin Klein and Carhartt. In 1999, he joined adidas, initially slated for Indonesia just as Jakarta's riots erupted, before ultimately leading adidas Indonesia for five years. He then spent six months in India addressing corruption issues, before moving to South Korea for more than six years, scaling the business significantly. Hardisty's long-held ambition was Japan, and he relocated with his family to lead adidas Japan, where he spent around a decade and helped drive major growth. His career arc reflects repeated adaptation across markets, cultures, and organisational scale, culminating in leading one of adidas's most sophisticated and strategically scrutinised country operations. Paul Hardisty's leadership story is a study in scale, trust, and the mechanics of change inside a complex, matrixed multinational. Having built a finance foundation in Australia and then taken on consecutive country leadership roles across Indonesia and South Korea, he arrived in Japan with a reputation for delivery and a clear-eyed sense that every market has its own "bucket of challenges". Japan's challenge was not drama; it was magnitude. The jump in organisational size, headcount, and global attention required him to rethink how a leader stays close to the business without drowning in it. Hardisty's early focus was listening: diagnos…

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