TOKYO—Kazuo Inamori, one of the great Japanese entrepreneurs of the postwar generation, who founded two multibillion-dollar companies and pulled another from the brink of bankruptcy, announced on Aug. died in Kyoto, Japan. he was 90 years old.
His death was confirmed in a statement by Kyocera, the fine ceramics and electronics giant he founded in Kyoto in 1959.
Known in Japan as the “god of management,” Mr. Inamori made the workplace a place of spiritual devotion, preaching a corporate spirit that prioritized pure profit.
His record of business success is almost unparalleled in the history of Japanese corporations, and the trio of business founders who, along with Sony’s Akio Morita and Honda’s Soichiro Honda, spearheaded Japan’s growth into an economic powerhouse. is often cited as one of the Decades after World War II.
Although Mr. Inamori was not as well known abroad as his contemporaries, his management style, drawn from Japanese spiritual traditions, has inspired generations of Japanese workers to instill a monastic level of devotion to their companies. urged to give
he said he “amoeba management– A philosophy that advocated dividing a company’s operations into smaller groups and delegating business decisions to those who best understood them: the employees. and even split it.
Inamori explained his theory in management books and spread it around the world through a network of leadership academies that have trained thousands of executives.especially his teaching ready audience In China, his books have reportedly sold millions of copies, and his name has been mentioned by people like Jack Ma, co-founder of Chinese e-commerce conglomerate Alibaba. .
After inducting Kyocera into Japan’s Hall of Fame, Inamori founded a second company, now known as KDDI, after NTT, a state-owned company that was privatized in the 1980s.
In 1997, he retired to pursue a devoted life as a monk, but was pulled back into the corporate world in 2010 at the age of 77.
Kazuo Inamori was born on January 30, 1932 in Kagoshima, a seaside city in Kyushu, Japan, the second of seven children to Keiichi and Kimi Inamori. As the story is told in Japan, when Kazuo was a child, his father’s printing shop was bombed at the end of World War II. A neighbor lent him a book, and he became interested in religion.
After graduating from Kagoshima University with a degree in chemical engineering, Mr. Inamori joined a small ceramics company in Kyoto as a researcher, but due to disagreements with management, he left to take up his own interests. He started his business with just his $10,000 and armed himself with a proprietary formula of materials for making ceramic insulators for televisions. He soon made his employees swear a blood oath to “work for the benefit of the peoples of the world.”
The business, then called Kyoto Ceramic Co., Ltd., got its first big break when it received an order to manufacture resistance bars for the Apollo space program. He then became one of the world’s top suppliers of high-tech ceramics, manufacturing everything from extremely sharp knives to the casings of Intel computers his chips, and also expanded into other products such as solar panels and mobile phones. was expanded.
While this venture has never made Kyocera known outside of Japan, it has made Inamori tremendously wealthy and brought him an unparalleled level of prestige and influence in his own country.
In 1984, after Japan ended its government monopoly in the telecommunications industry, he founded his second company, DDI. DDI is a long-distance carrier that has quickly broken out of his once state-owned NTT’s dominance of the market.
Around the same time, beyond the industrial world, Inamori spent more than $80 million to establish the Kyoto Prize, an award that recognizes the most significant advances in science, art, technology and philosophy.
Although he set the prize lower than the Nobel Prize, he did not hide his wider ambitions for the prize. at the time “I would be more than happy if it stimulates the construction of a new philosophical paradigm.”
After retiring as chairman of two companies, Inamori pursued his philosophical interests and withdrew into a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, where he lived the life of a monk, shaved his head, got up early to meditate, and maintained a vegetarian diet. did.
But the gravitational pull of the material world was too strong to resist. In 2010, the Japanese government recruited him to save JAL when the airline filed for bankruptcy. By cutting people, we turned the company around in less than three years.
His survivors include his wife Asako and daughter Shinobu Kanazawa.
Inamori, who coined Kyocera’s motto, “Honor God and Love People,” is known as a taskmaster who demands perfection from his employees, and his reputation makes it difficult for Kyocera to find new talent. had.
To foster what is seen as a cult-like devotion among his employees, for years he has gone from reading and discussing passages from his little blue book of teachings to daily work. requested the employee to start
Although he had a reputation for being humble, he also had a disrespectful belief in the way he worked. To tell Tokyo Journal 2015: “For 56 years, my management philosophy has never changed.
In his preface to “From Zero to Kyocera,” he said that his book “has a ‘success formula’ that serves as a bible for management and life.”
“Without this kind of spiritual background, I don’t think Kyocera would be as successful as it is today,” Inamori told The New York Times in 1997, always prioritizing ethics in business decisions. claimed to be
That approach, he believed, was fundamentally different from that of European and American companies. They are “only thinking about whether they can make a profit,” he said, adding, “That’s why I think capitalism is on the decline now.”
Years later, he summed up his philosophy for reversing that decline: ”
Hisako Ueno contributed to the report.