When Mr. Inamori* released his book “To find your vocation-what is the ultimate objective of work-”, he made a speech for Seiwajuku members, most of whom are business leaders of small to middle companies in Japan, to demonstrate the ideas to be shared with employees of their companies.
Mr. Inamori said “The only one way to your business success is continuous endeavor and accumulated improvements”
To find the vocational work, he pointed out the following tips.
1 Determine yourself to your commitment
2 Like your work
3 Pile up small but daily improvements
4 Keep working
5 Treasure your philosophy
6 Put higher importance on employees not on shareholders
1 Determine yourself to your commitment
Mr. Inamori showed his episode when he joined his first company, Shofu Work. Shofu was about to go bankrupt, new employees had been leaving the company and Inamori was the last one left to the company.
He thought, ”Leaving or staying, no matter what option I take, I must have a very convincing reason. That reason should never be the money, nor my personal benefit. Therefore, I decided to stay at that company and got well determined to dedicate myself to the ceramic research.”
>>> Getting determined implies that we identify options we can take, compare one from the other regarding each one of pros and cons, then finally select one option that we are going to take.
2 Like your work
We strongly feel that peoples’ concerns usually come from the situation where we got stuck without any other option, we feel that we are forced to do only one thing, we can’t escape. When we find ourselves to be in that dead-end, we naturally feel suffering and struggle with issues.
Mr. Inamori said, “When we feel that we are forced to work, we may feel ourselves as victims, and eventually we can’t live our lives affirmatively. This eventually leads us to blame someone and to avoid facing our lives.”
Mr. Inamori might have thought that he could quit, come back to his hometown, and devote himself to research. He might have finally decided to stay at the company and commit himself to research works.
“We finally completed the experiment which at that time only GE had done in the world. The technology we accomplished around that time eventually became the fundamental technical platform on which Kyocera has developed. From this experience, I learned that being fascinated with our work is the initial point of our success. I really felt that it’s important to enjoy our work despite the difficulties in completing our work. I was almost dancing when I got the experiment data to justify our assumptions. To fulfill our lives, we have two options, 1 do the work you like, 2 be fond of the work that you are involved in, only limited numbers of people can follow pattern one but the majority of us have to follow pattern two. Therefore, we would better like our work as soon as possible. For us to do, we have to commit ourselves to our work and deliver the results. ”
>>> For us to facilitate the above processes, we may have to identify the reason why our work is annoying. Which part of our work don’t interest us. We may consider this point for us to start liking our works.
We hate our colleagues, the type of work itself?
Each part of the job described we don’t like, so any other job we may feel interesting?
Our salary is too low, top management are not the ones to be respected…?
We may be able to figure out the reason why we don’t like our works, and this process will allow us to weaken our negative feelings.
3 Pile up small but daily improvements
Keeping our endeavor and chipping out small but daily efforts are necessary for us to enjoy our work. Daily improvements allow us to overcome any difficulties and finally we may be able to feel more fulfilled.
>>> Above mentioned analysis on our works may be a part of daily efforts that Mr. Inamori mentioned.
The tips No 4-6 will be explained in our next Blog.
Further queries or doubts, please email to ytomizuka@abrilsjp.com
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