Great Principle for Success by Great Japanese Entrepreneur, Kazuo Inamori

Who is Kazuo Inamori?

A great Japanese entrepreneur, Kazuo Inamori passed away on August 24, 2022. He is the founder of Kyocera and KDDI which are well known companies in Japan. He is not only known as a great entrepreneur but also as an author of “Kyocera Management Philosophy” which is full of great management principles.

In his philosophy, there are many principles which enlighten us on our working attitude and management. Among those, one of my favorites is the principle regarding the importance of ordinary daily tasks.

Accumulate Tedious Efforts

Having great vision and fervent desire is important, but even if you have these, your daily work still requires many mundane, tedious tasks. So, at times, it is natural to wonder about "the huge gap between my vision and reality," and become frustrated by it.

In any field, wonderful outcomes are the result of tedious efforts - such as step-by-step process improvement, collecting data and experimenting, or door-to-door order-taking.

We should not forget that no great feat is accomplished overnight. It is always a step-by-step accumulation of tedious endeavors. (Source)

We always dream of having success. However, we rarely think about the process to become successful. And if we look closely at the process. We will know it is just an accumulation of small successes.

Let’s say a person is learning a language. The person will not suddenly become fluent in the language. The person needs to learn new vocabulary and grammar everyday. Furthermore, the person needs to keep using those vocabulary and grammar so that the person becomes comfortable using those. There would be almost no difference in day-to-day comparison. But the person will notice improvement once the person looks back a year. If the person doesn’t believe in day-to-day progress and does not learn everyday, the progress will become small.

This can apply for the sales goal also. In fact in the B to B world, there is a case where a huge customer adopts the solution and provides big sales growth. However, it is a really rare case. Most of the time, sales is the repeating process of meeting with customers, explaining the benefit and providing the solution. And, each sales revenue is not that big. But, by believing the growth and continuing to accumulate sales numbers, we can see the sales growth at the end of the fiscal year.

James Clear who is the author of Atomic Habits explained the importance of small improvement by showing if the person made an improvement everyday for 1%, accumulated improvement will become 37.78 times the original. This fact also shows the importance of small steps.

Daily improvement is the key

As Kazuo Iwamori mentioned, even if it is a small ordinary step, there is always room for improvement. And in order to make an improvement, we need to keep experimenting and gathering data. Therefore, even if it is an ordinary routine task, it is an opportunity for greater success in the future. And, by having a mind set of making improvements day by day, success becomes closer and closer.