On a friend's recommendation, I recently read A Life Worth Living, the autobiography of Kazuo Inamori, the man often called Japan's "god of management". Alongside his account of his approach to running a business, his thinking on human resources philosophy is especially worth an HR professional's attention.
A quick word first on just how remarkable Inamori was. He grew up through the Second World War and single-handedly built Kyocera into one of the 2019 Fortune Global 500 companies. In Japan, his standing is mentioned in the same breath as Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic. His most celebrated "miracle" in recent years was rescuing a bankrupt Japan Airlines in the wake of the financial crisis and relisting it on the stock market just over a thousand days later.
Inamori's success owed much to a distinctive management philosophy — and just as much to his philosophy on how to treat employees.
1. An early pioneer of employer branding
Back in the 1960s, no company was talking about employer branding. Yet even when Inamori was still an ordinary employee, he placed great weight on staying connected with his colleagues, because he believed that the relationships between employees were the key to success. Once he founded his own company, he held firm to running staff-bonding activities. Later, when he rescued Japan Airlines, he introduced employee engagement as a vital part of turning the business around.
2. Sharing the good times
As the saying goes, share your good fortune. Inamori would often teach his managers to put their employees' interests first, and Kyocera's success was in large part tied to this principle. When business was good, he was always willing to share it with his staff — on one occasion, when the company hit its targets, Kyocera even took its entire workforce on a trip to Hong Kong.
3. Weathering the hard times together
"Every member of staff is a treasure of the company, an asset of the company," Inamori once said. Within the Kyocera he founded, he held firm to never laying anyone off. Even during a stretch when Japan's economy was in a slump and many companies were cutting jobs, he chose to solve the problem through redeployment instead.
4. Giving employees a greater sense of ownership
During the rescue of Japan Airlines, Inamori held fast to his own management philosophy, infusing JAL with his original "Amoeba Management": each department runs independently, takes responsibility for its own profit and loss, and instils a sense of cost in every employee. As long as they had their supervisor's agreement, employees were free to go beyond their own role and take on work that benefited the company — for example, a technician could just as well do a salesperson's job, provided they had the ability.
5. Inamori's HR philosophy: win people's hearts, win the world
Inamori believed that people's hearts can become an indestructible force, and that a leader who thinks for their employees is often the one who finds the path to success. There are plenty of companies in the world that are stronger than your own — only by uniting people's hearts can the underdog overcome the favourite.
Reproduced from HR Mashed Potato; the content or title may have been edited. Original link: https://www.mashedpatata.com/%e6%97%a5%e6%9c%ac%e7%b6%93%e7%87%9f%e4%b9%8b%e7%a5%9e-%e7%a8%bb%e7%9b%9b%e5%92%8c%e5%a4%ab-%e7%9a%84%e4%ba%ba%e5%8a%9b%e8%b3%87%e6%ba%90%e5%93%b2%e5%ad%b8/
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