Business-Do

The Way to Successful Leadership

Hiroshi Mikitani

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781119412229
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119412250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Habilidades empresariales

Practical advice for your personal journey, from a self-made billionaire

Business-Do is your personal handbook for achieving happiness by systematically turning your dreams into reality. Success looks different to everyone, but author Hiroshi Mikitani exemplifies its essential, universal qualities: as the founder and CEO of Rakuten, Mikitani is a self-made entrepreneur who became Japan's leader in the new global economy—a journey that made him a billionaire. In this book, he shows you how to achieve your own version of success in work and in life. Paying homage to Japan's ethos of quality and discipline, this book shares 89 principles Mikitani has gathered over the course of his remarkable career. These thought-provoking, action-oriented rules show you everything from how useful your dreams are, to the best way to harness the internet, to what management techniques work to the importance of self-improvement. The result: your own powerful, personal playbook straight from the mind of an inspirational trailblazer.

Mikitani guided Rakuten from its 1997 foundation to become one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, with a still rapidly-expanding global footprint reaching industries including fintech, messaging, digital content, and even drones. This book describes the ideas, thoughts, actions, and philosophies that drove Mikitani to the top.

• Discover the myriad ways in which the internet is fundamentally transforming the world
• Learn from a blend of Japanese discipline and commitment to quality and the Silicon Valley approach to business, where collaboration and agility are essential and lucrative
• Adopt data-driven management techniques that constantly question, constantly improve, and empower people to exceptional performance
• Share in Mikitani's optimistic vision, and his industry-specific predictions

Happiness is something you live every day. It is both the result and the critical ingredient of success, and there is plenty to go around. Business-Do gives you the principles you need on your own journey to success.

1
The 10 Core Principles

The ten business rules explored in this chapter are the foundation of my business philosophy. They are the keys to success, and I review them here in order of importance. I urge you to read these rules in sequence, from the beginning.

01 All concepts are relative

Never believe in the absolute.

No one way of thinking is perfect. Nothing in this world is absolute. Say you turn on a light bulb in a dark room. It feels bright. But step inside a room lit by a single bulb after being outside in the midday sun, and it will seem dark. Everything is relative.

Nothing in human thought is absolutely right. So you shouldn't put your faith in dubious expressions such as, “It's just common sense.”

This is my basic philosophy. In fact, common sense itself is often completely arbitrary.

Here's an example: Some 20 years ago, I began my business—an online shopping marketplace. I was not the first to try this. Several other companies including famous leaders such as IBM had tried this, and failed. Because they had failed, many told me I was foolish to try it myself. Online shopping malls won't work, they told me. It's just common sense.

Obviously, that turned out not to be true. It was not “common sense” that blocked online marketplaces from thriving. Online marketplaces were a good idea, waiting for good execution to attract customers. When the right online marketplaces were launched, customers flocked to them. So much for the “common sense” that said it would never work.

Business books repeat ad nauseam that you shouldn't fall into the trap of common sense. So why do people continue to do so? We need to seriously consider the reasons for this.

All ways of thinking have strengths and weaknesses. That's why—despite many thousands of years having passed since people started to form societies—humankind still hasn't discovered how to organize a perfect society. Perhaps it never will.

Philosophies, ideas, and ideologies continually evolve and change with surprising fluidity. This is the nature of human society. Nothing is certain. It doesn't follow, however, that nothing has any value.

What's important is to keep moving forward, even if you're unsteady. Children who have just started to walk fall over all the time. You have to lose your balance in order to walk. The very act of taking a step forward means being off balance. You lose your balance, then regain it. Repeat this action, and you move forward.

Civilizations and societies seem to progress in essentially the same way. This loss of balance is at the heart of evolution.

I'm not talking in the abstract. Awareness of this idea plays a vital role in all aspects of daily life. And naturally, that includes business.

Don't be afraid of losing your balance and falling over. After all, children learn how to walk by falling. After only six months of practice, they'll rarely stumble.

There's no such thing as a way of thinking that's correct all of the time. That's ultimately why I think “common sense” should be viewed skeptically. Ideas evolve and can be refined when they are thrown off balance.

Be suspicious of common sense. Don't be afraid of defying it. Follow the path you believe in.

02 Believe in the power of the moonshot

Aim high—higher than you think is possible.

Both individuals and businesses have to experience breakthroughs to grow significantly. NASA made it to the moon because the moon was the goal. It wasn't simply the result of gradual technical improvements. The stretch goal itself had power.

Achieving a breakthrough means going beyond limits. Only after breaking through barriers that weren't meant to be broken and going beyond your own limits will you be able to see through to the next stage.

The problem is, the barriers themselves can be hard to see. Athletes aside, most of us don't think about the pursuit of our fullest potential and where our limits may be.

What is it that allows you to see your limits clearly? Goals.

On May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. This was a response to the Sputnik crisis. Sputnik was the world's first artificial satellite, and it had been launched successfully by the Soviet Union. The United States had been outpaced. The thought that the Soviet Union, the hypothetical enemy, had overtaken the United States was a huge blow to American confidence. And just a month before Kennedy's address, the USSR had successfully launched a manned satellite into space. Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to look down on the Earth with his own eyes.

President Kennedy announced the plan to send a man to the moon to counter the widespread shock felt in the United States. His speech galvanized the American people. And the genius of it was that Kennedy set a time frame of nine years, telling the public that the United States would achieve the goal not “someday,” but “before this decade is out” (for more information, see https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm).

The United States committed itself to sending a man to a heavenly body some 240,000 miles away when it was having trouble even launching satellites into orbit around Earth. And it was going to get that done in just nine years.

Common sense would say that it was impossible.

But that near impossibility instead made it a noble, heroic target.

Obviously, President Kennedy couldn't have been certain the goal would be achieved. But he probably thought he could prove it wasn't impossible.

Hearing of this seemingly impossible goal must have helped to make crystal clear the barriers blocking the way of the people working on the space program. I don't know if they faced dozens or hundreds of barriers, but I can say for certain that they overcame every one of them. They achieved dozens, perhaps hundreds, of breakthroughs, and on July 20, 1969, at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Nothing is impossible. Inevitably, the impossible will become a possibility.

Humankind's future depends on how many people believe this, and the Apollo 11 moon landing definitely created some believers.

It was achieved because President Kennedy set a clear, specific time frame of nine years, not simply because advances in aviation technology suddenly meant humankind could reach the moon.

This principle applies to all kinds of business, too. There is no such thing as aimless growth. There is no way that people or companies can truly grow if they simply plod along aimlessly doing routine work. Setting clear, specific goals and doing everything in your power to achieve them is essential for growth.

Set big goals. Set clear and specific goals with deadlines, and commit to achieving them. It's those goals that will generate transformational growth for you and for your company.

03 Learn the difference between a group and a team

You'll do your best work—by far—when you think of yourself as part of a team.

A group of thousands who merely carry out their assigned tasks is nothing more than a mob. It doesn't deserve to be called an organization. An organization must always strive to be more than just a random group completing predefined tasks. It must aim to be a team where members transcend individual roles and their efforts complement each other.

For practical reasons, roles and responsibilities have to be distributed when organizations become large. However, this often goes too far, especially in big organizations. Employees come to believe that their job is to simply fulfill the role they've been given. They even start to think that it's wrong for them to do anything that doesn't match their job description. This way of thinking is a destructive sickness.

Every business is at war in the effort to excel.

Since it's a competition, it's meaningless unless you win. To be certain of achieving victory, every member of your organization must work as though they themselves bear full responsibility for accomplishing the goals of the team. That is the moment at which a group evolves and can truly be called a team.

Here's one way I work to make that happen. At Rakuten, all employees clean their workplaces on Monday mornings. This has been the practice since the company had just a handful of employees.

It doesn't matter whether you are a new hire fresh out of college or a senior executive. We all clean our workplaces thoroughly. We all get down on our knees and polish our chair legs. We do this to remind ourselves that there's no aspect of the company's business that doesn't concern us.

The company's business is our business. From where you sit, do you believe this with all your heart? Those who don't will never succeed.

If you are a supervisor or a manager, you should never forget that winning hinges on whether you can bring together the people who work with you—to form that kind of team. If you are an employee, winning hinges on whether you can work as a member of your team, without ever losing focus. This is extremely important—important enough to transform your life.

If you think it's enough just to do the work you're paid for, and that doing any more is a waste of time, you're throwing your life down the drain. Working in this way is simply selling off chunks of your life—and our lives are not long enough for that. If you sell your life bit by bit, 30 to 40 years will go by before you know it.

New hires and junior employees should approach their work with the belief that they are key players who will take the company to new heights. An organization starts to realize its true potential when all team members share this belief. And when that happens, your own individual abilities will start to shine.

Even the best racecar driver won't win with an underperforming car. The relationship between individuals and a team is no different. You must not see yourself as alone, but as a part of a larger pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 0 Clean Your Space
• 1 The 10 Core Principles
• 2 Personal Development
• 3 The Value of Relationships
• 4 Get Your Organization Moving
• 5 Win Every Battle
• 6 Nurture a Global Mindset
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• End User License Agreement