The four-circle ikigai diagram — love, skill, need and payment, with ikigai at the centre — is a fixture of leadership decks across Europe. It is not Japanese. It descends from a purpose diagram published by the Spanish author Andrés Zuzunaga around 2011; a British blogger relabelled the centre ikigai in 2014, and it travelled from there. Japanese scholarship on ikigai, from the psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya through to Ken Mogi's five pillars, describes something quieter and more everyday: what makes getting up worthwhile. Mostly small, mostly unpaid, and nothing to do with career design.
Worth knowing before building on it. Worth building on anyway. As a strategy instrument the diagram earns its place, because it forces four tests where most strategy work runs two. Companies are fluent in what they are good at and what they can charge for. They are far less rigorous about what they actually want to be, and about which needs in their market are real but not yet purchasable.
The Hedgehog Concept in Good to Great asks three questions: what you can be best in the world at, what you are deeply passionate about, and what drives your economic engine. The third is usually read as "how we make money". That undersells it. Collins asks for a single denominator — profit per what — chosen because moving it moves everything else.
The denominator is a governing choice, not a reporting one. It decides which trade-offs are obvious, which customers look attractive, what the commercial team optimises without being told, and — most usefully — which work to refuse. Get it wrong and a company can execute flawlessly against a number that does not compound.
| Denominator | What it makes the organisation optimise | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| Per shipment | Volume and cost per unit | Commoditises. Race to the bottom of the lane. |
| Per asset | Utilisation — vehicles, wagons, terminal slots | Real, but it optimises the asset you happen to own. |
| Per customer | Account depth, cross-sell, retention | Better. Still linear in sales effort. |
| Per lane | Density and balance on a route | Closer — but a lane is a price, not a position. |
| Per corridor relationship | The position where several flows, a node and their counterparties meet | Compounds. Each new flow reuses the same relationship. |
Value in logistics accrues to whoever controls flows, customer relationships and critical nodes — not to whoever owns the most equipment. That is the node-and-flow argument, and the denominator is its financial expression. A corridor relationship is the smallest unit that contains all three: the flows, the counterparties who decide what moves through them, and the node where those decisions land.
| Decision | Under per-shipment | Under per-corridor |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Rate per unit, tendered annually | A position held on a retainer or a term, with volume on top |
| New business | Any volume is good volume | Corridor volume comes first; the rest is taken on its own terms and priced separately |
| Reporting | Activity and cost | Corridor state: counterparties, readiness, volume in sight |
| Investment | Assets that lower unit cost | Whatever deepens the position — data, node access, contracts |
| Renewal question | "Did we get value for the spend?" | "Do we still want to hold this corridor?" |
That last row is the whole argument. A supplier priced per shipment is re-tendered against the cheapest alternative every year. A partner who holds a corridor position is re-tendered against the cost of losing it — and the answer to a strategic question is much harder to commoditise than the answer to a procurement one.
The Hedgehog Concept has no circle for "what the world needs" — in effect, it treats need as arriving already priced. In European transport, right now, a large amount of it does not — yet. Decarbonisation reporting obligations are landing ahead of the systems that can satisfy them. Regulatory evidence requirements are being written for supply chains that cannot currently produce the underlying data. Cross-border corridors need coordination between parties none of whom will accept a single owner, which means the coordinating layer has to be federated rather than owned by any one of them.
These are real needs with immature demand. Under a per-shipment denominator they are invisible — nobody is paying for them, so they do not exist. Under a per-corridor denominator they are among the most valuable things on the horizon, because they attach to corridors, not consignments, and whoever holds the corridor position is the natural place for them to land.
That is the practical reason to keep the fourth circle in the picture. Not as an ethical flourish — as an early-warning system for revenue that has not been priced yet.
Nomon works on Nordic and Baltic transport systems — network design, operational transformation, and the commercial architecture around corridors. We apply the same denominator to ourselves: wherever the mandate allows, we price against a corridor position rather than days, and report on the state of the corridor rather than on activity.
It also sets our order of work. Mandates that build a corridor position, or sit adjacent to one, come first. Adjacent has a precise meaning here: a mandate is adjacent when it shares a node, a counterparty or the data layer that the corridor runs on. Ports and terminal operators, ferry and rail undertakings, shippers with repeating volume on the same geography, and the coordination infrastructure the whole corridor depends on are all adjacencies: work in any one of them makes the next piece of work in the others easier and better informed. Everything outside that is taken on its own terms, priced as a discrete assignment, and judged on its own merits.
The result is a practice that gets deeper rather than wider. That is the trade, and we think it is the right way round.
Background reading. The origin of the ikigai diagram: The View Inside. The Japanese concept: Ikigai Tribe; Ken Mogi, Awakening Your Ikigai. The Hedgehog Concept: Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001).