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.

Recently I have been reading the book written by Shigetaka Komori, former CEO of Fujifilm, One of Japan’s biggest global companies. His biggest achievement lies in leading Fuji successfully through the digital revolution. It was also that time when their biggest rival, Kodak, filed for bankruptcy.
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It’s hard to predict the future with this Covid 19. Everything has stopped, probably 90% of economic activity, gobally. When will this quarantine end? No one knows. It is totally unprecedented and everyone was caught flat-footed.

The best question for entrepreneurs is not how to find an opportunity in this crisis, instead, how to adjust to the new normal.

What is the new normal? Continue reading →

Entrepreneurs can start or grow a business like no risks are involved.  Risk happens when status quo is challenged. An entrepreneur who wants to grow his business must go through the same uncertainty he went through when he or she aspired to have a business. These successful entrepreneurs are not without fear of risks. They venture the unknown with the possibility of both success or failure.  It is their ability to mitigate risks that increase their odds of winning, making it less of a gamble.

Not all risks are made the same and not all people have the same risk profile. The more you understand the different types of risks and your risk profile, the more ways you can predict and control the outcome, as well as adjust yourself, making you more confident to take risks.

Knowing your risk profile will allow you to see which one to work on. The idea is to take small risk and make small wins or loses allowing you to learn from the experience. The more experience you have the more confident you will become. You also need to be self-aware on how much risk you can take in order to make the exercise effective. In terms of financial risk, for example, you need to know up to how much you can lose in a venture. This will help you know which business you can comfortably start or if the risk involved is high, you can invite others to share the risk with you.

The 5 types of risks are the following: