Innovation
New categories, new methods, and the habits that make invention repeatable.
Articles on this topic
Last updated:
CEO Essays·
Cherish Companions Who Rejoice Together
One of our executives wrote that he decided to join after being struck by words I spoke when we met through work: "Cherish the companions who rejoice together." Truthfully, I never invented this as a management philosophy — I have simply lived my name, Tomoki, "to bring joy to friends." But he heard it through his own pain: having lost a business, he knew firsthand that relationships of mutual rejoicing, not of profit and loss, are the true foundation of a lasting enterprise. Rejoicing together sounds easy and is not. Consoling a companion's failure is surprisingly manageable; the hard thing is rejoicing at a companion's success as if it were your own, without the quiet muddying of comparison.
ReadCEO Essays·
Management by Executive Essays
A company that has its executives write life essays is rare, apparently. I am convinced it is a serious management method, for three reasons. First, writing is an inventory: executives buried in daily operations will never articulate where they came from and where they are going unless the time is deliberately made.
ReadCEO Essays·
Sakichi Toyoda — From One Loom for His Mother to Toyota
Sakichi Toyoda was a carpenter's son whose inventions began not with grand ambition but with the sight of his mother weaving late into the night on a hand loom. Wanting to ease her labor, he taught himself loom design — mocked as the village eccentric who shut himself in a barn. He persisted, eventually perfecting an automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke: building "no defects" into the machine itself, the headwater of the Toyota Production System.
ReadCEO Essays·
Osamu Tezuka — "Please, Just Let Me Work"
Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga, held a medical license and a doctorate. Torn between the stable path of medicine and the then-lowly path of comics, he asked his mother, who reportedly answered: "Which do you love?" He chose manga. What followed was output on a historic scale: some 700 titles and 150,000 pages, effectively inventing story manga — Astro Boy, Phoenix, Black Jack — laying the foundations of anime and manga nearly alone.
Read