Worklife

Ramblings about workplace culture, life in Japan, and then some.

Entrepreneurial spirit stays the same

Jun 06, 2004 23:57 pm / Add a comment

I was sort­ing the kids’ book shelf, and noticed one of my book, Mat­sushita Lead­er­ship, which I have really enjoyed read­ing about 5 years ago was buried under­neath piles of other books, so I pulled it out and started read­ing randomly.

Treat the peo­ple you do busi­ness with as if they were a part of your fam­ily. Pros­per­ity depends on how much under­stand­ing one receives from the peo­ple with whom one con­ducts busi­ness… After-sales ser­vice is more impor­tant than assis­tance before sales. It is through such ser­vice that one gets per­ma­nent cus­tomers… Don’t sell cus­tomers goods that they are attracted to, sell them goods that will ben­e­fit them… Any waste, even of a sheet of paper, will increase the price of a prod­uct by that much… To be out of stock is due to care­less­ness. If This hap­pens, apol­o­gize to the cus­tomers, ask for their address, and tell them that you will deliver the goods immediately.

This, accord­ing to John P. Kot­ter, was what was devel­oped dur­ing Matsushita’s first fif­teen years in busi­ness from 1917 to 1932. Change “To be out of stock” with “To not be able to ser­vice”, as in call cen­ter or web access, then we are in 2004. It struck me that what Mat­sushita was doing back in early days of indus­trial Japan and what entre­pre­neurs are doing now as shown in The New Pio­neers are the same. That is, be focused on peo­ple and con­tribut­ing first.

It appears that any suc­cess­ful com­pany starts out with such spirit. But with all comap­neis, sooner or later the spirit inevitably become deluted when orga­ni­za­tion grow in size. We are find­ing that such spirit can not be sus­tained in its orginal­ity, because we all have to expe­ri­ence it, live it to know it. The edu­ca­tion sys­tem both the for­mal and later through com­pany train­ing focuses too much on know­ing it by rote. It may seem effi­cient, but human behav­ior just is not effi­cient like that.

 

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