This is one of the books I read during ECQ and it’s fitting of the time we are in. I bought this book a year or 2 ago from Amazon. I am going to share with you his mindset, managerial, & leadership lessons I learned from reading this book.

To give a brief background of the author, Shigetaka Komori was the CEO of Fujifilm. He was the CEO that successfully brought Fujifilm to a new era after weathering the digital revolution storm in the early 2000. I find this book as valuable as taking a Masters Degree or even Ph.D. because of the wisdom and experience he shared in managing the company.

First his leadership style. He does not believe in consensus leadership, where one gets the views of each stakeholder. He said that this type of leadership is fine when everything is going well but in times of crisis, one must be decisive and take full responsibility for whatever the outcome will be.

As a manager, he has a valuable strategic framework we can bring to our business. He has a direct 4 step strategic planning framework.

1. Read. Learn to read and feel the situation. Understand what is happening and learn what is happening. He would read magazines and newspapers to get valuable information. Sometimes, he would read something this week and his questions won’t be answered until he cross checks another source of information. This process of reading has helped him in making good business predictions.
2. Plan. Planning is his way of understanding what his priorities will be. This is also his source of script that he will use to motivate the employees.
3.  Communicate. No CEO can do it by himself, he needs to communicate the plan to everyone in the company to motivate them to join the cause.
4. Act. Like any CEO, this is the most important. No plan is ever great without action.

Finally, his mindset towards competition which he values. For him it is very important to be competitive, to win in an honest way. This is the only way to make the company win. When this is the mindset, it is not the the company that wins, but the whole country too. This attitude towards being competitive is something he got from his father. One time he came home after being picked on by an older boy, his father gave him a beating and told him to go back and finish the fight. From then on he learnt not to give up.

I have read many business books, but this is one of those books that has plenty of valuable lessons one can apply in any size of business. I sure will be including the lessons I learned here to my future lectures. If you are interested, you can get this from Amazon.