“For Whom the Bell Tolls” is the novel of Earnest Hemingway published in 1940. However, this time, Mr. Inamori raised the question “For whom does the president work?”. In other words, this asks about the presidents’ lives. For what reason are they working so hard? Some say that to be rich, that’s why they are squeezing their employees and accumulating their wealth. Others say that they just want to develop venture capital, realize their IPO’s and make a lot of money via such schemes.
However, Mr. Inamori said that presidents should work to fulfill their lives. So what can fulfill those presidents’ lives? Money, wealth, fame, or excitement, or something to fulfill their desires? Inamori said, nothing can ultimately fulfill presidents, unless they think about their own souls and spirits. Inamori continues, the tips to fulfill presidents’ lives are as follows:
1 Holding strong desires
2 Striving yourselves much harder than anyone else
3 Working to fulfill materially and mentally all of our staffs
4 Delivering selfless minds
5 Only altruism helps president
Let me explain one by one
1 Holding strong desires
Inamori said the desire always has a strong power to drive people to achieve their goals. Always desire comes first.
Even though we understand how important holding desire is, we don’t pay that much attention to it. There are two reasons why we can’t believe the power of desires.
1-1 Underestimating ourselves
1-1, those who don’t want to understand the power of desires are people who don’t trust themselves. They are scenically judging themselves to be unqualified ones to make the breakthrough. Thus, they look down upon not only their employees but themselves. Even though they objectively judge their incompetency as top managements, they should say like this: Well guys, I know I am not an excellent leader as Inamori however, I have just decided to fulfill your lives, so I am committing myself to do that, why don’t we work together to improve the quality of your lives?
Inamori said this is a very important attitude for top management to hold.
1-2 Being afraid of failures
Sometimes people need to have an excuse not to believe in the power of desire. They are just simply afraid of failure. However, please think about the situation where you find a person who worked hard, strived himself but ended up unsuccessful. What do you think of him? I would find him to be impressive. I would spontaneously like to help him. I would feel he encouraged me to challenge myself as well. Thus, in that sense, I feel that this is a form of love spreading in this universe. If we try to find it, we are full of such compassion and encouragement. People surrounding us are always favorable to us. If you work a little, but on your way to success, you get arrogant, snobbish, and divulge yourself in lavish lifestyles, people would definitely hate you and pay no sympathy to you failures. Therefore, both Inamori and Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, reiterated that the top management should always remain humble.
2 Striving yourselves much harder than anyone else
Inamori always refers to the example of wild plants. When he took a walk around Kyoto, grass was appearing in the gap between the stone walls of the castle ruins. When he wondered if plants would grow in such a place, there was only a small amount of soil between the stones, from which the grass had just sprouted. Eventually, in the summer, the stone walls would be too hot by the scorching sun and dried up. Thus the grass could not survive. Before the hot summer comes, they survive as hard as they can and prepare to leave offspring and to die. The grass is just simply surviving in the given environment. They never intend to beat other species. Nature was originally created to drive us to work hard to survive. In the natural environment all the creatures are deemed to work hard to survive. Only humans want to be lazy and forget about diligence.
Tips of 3-5 will be explained in the next blog.
Further queries or doubts, please email to ytomizuka@abrilsjp.com
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