Historically, the primary approach of both the consultants and trainers has been to demonstrate Aikido and its core principles as a context and then provide, slow motion, non falling exercises drawn directly from mat practice to establish an experiential, embodied understanding of those principles and a physical simulation of their application to business life. Pioneers in advising business in these ways are Koichi Tohei who focused on applications to daily life, Terry Dobson and Tom Crum who focused on conflict resolution and George Leonard who focused on human potential. Tom continues to lead the field as a speaker, consultant and trainer.

Since the early seventies these and other practitioners have expanded the business applications to focus on individual performance improvement including leadership development, sales mastery, interpersonal communications, emotional intelligence, stress management, creativity and intuition, and team development. Further applications have evolved with more systemic focus on organization development including culture design, mission and vision definition, values clarity, strategic planning and market navigation, operations management, cross department collaboration, stakeholder management and multi-company partnership relations.

Some of the most striking progress in taking Aikido into business has been made in the field of leadership development in the USA. Richard Strozzi, based on his work consulting both corporate executives and the military, established Strozzi Institute, now on the leading edge of leadership development. Chris Thorsen and Richard Moon spent 15 years as leadership development advisors to key executive teams that built out the wireless industry, giving them the unprecedented opportunity to work with intact business teams for a dozen years in a row. In 2007, Tom Crum was ranked among the top 25 thought leaders in personal development and among the top 80 in leadership development by Leadership Excellence.

Rather than trying to convince others that Aikido is important to them, we need to practice blending by listening to their view of their business needs. Once we deepen our understanding of their challenges, we’re in a position to offer how our methods might be of service as a way of fulfilling their desired outcomes. We’re there primarily to help their business progress, not to demonstrate how powerful our Aikido is.

There are three proven ways of offering the art as a business tool. We can directly offer presentations and trainings billed as Aikido or Aikido based; we can engage as generic organization consultants, trainers or coaches and only bring Aikido forward explicitly as the need arises; or, as either service providers to, or members of an organization, we can utilize its principles and practices implicitly without direct reference to the art – say to practice self mastery or to aid in collaboration.

Once the art is explicitly presented, however, we face the challenge of translating the terms in which we’ve learned the art into language that can be easily understood by laymen. For example, Irimi can become engagement or intervention, Tenkan can become listening, or Randori can be a way of looking at handling multiple pressures during the business day. The rule of thumb is again to start with their way of speaking and seeing and looking for the analogs in the art.