Innovation
New categories, new methods, and the habits that make invention repeatable.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thomas Edison — "I Found 10,000 Ways That Won't Work"
Thomas Edison left school after three months; the boy his teacher gave up on was educated by his mother. From a basement full of experiments came the incandescent lamp, the phonograph, motion pictures — over a thousand patents shaping modern life. His filament hunt is synonymous with obsession: thousands of materials tested, scouts dispatched worldwide — one of the answers, memorably for us Japanese, being bamboo from Kyoto.
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Henry Ford — Beyond "a Faster Horse"
When Henry Ford began, automobiles were toys for the rich. His revolution was not an invention but a change of "for whom." Build a car working people can afford — everything was back-calculated from that purpose. The 1908 Model T: assembly-line production slashed build time, and the price fell from $850 to under $300.
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Sam Walton — The Learning Genius From a Country Town
The world's largest retailer, Walmart, began as a single variety store in small-town Arkansas; founder Sam Walton opened store number one at forty- four — another late-blooming giant. His weapon was no brilliant invention but an abnormal capacity to learn. He devoted his life to touring competitors' stores, measuring aisle widths with a tape measure, copying price tags, adopting every good idea instantly.
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