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The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

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Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#21

Post by rl3 »

anpk wrote: post #7
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #3

Say what you will, but >After taking the CEO role without pay, he printed a small book for each staff member on his philosophies, which declared that the company was devoted to their growth. >"Company leaders should seek to make all their employees happy, both materially and intellectually," Inamori said. I'd take a pay cut to work at a place like that. Enjoying your work, feeling like you will be taken care of, and…

> In a 2004 book on his philosophy, he questioned Japanese people’s increasing tendency to value leisure time. That makes one of us.

To further expand on this:

>When Inamori talks about making employees happy, he doesn’t mean they’ll be putting their feet up. His brand of happiness comes from working harder than anyone else. It’s infused with the Buddhist idea of “shojin,” elevating the soul through devotion to a task.

That's nice and all, but not if it comes at the expense of employee leisure time or pay.

Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#22

Post by Nadya »

ddellacosta wrote: post #20

Forget it, says Kazuo Inamori, entrepreneur, management guru and Buddhist priest. Spend your time making staff happy instead. Huh...and here I thought Kyocera had a reputation in Japan for being a terrible place to work. (sorry, no luck finding links in English, but search for 京セラブラック企業) and you get a fair number of links. https://www.google.com/search?q=京セラブラック企業 EDIT: (ブラック企業 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_C…

To be fair, a lot can change in a decade, which seems to be what most results are centered around (a whistle blower from 1999 who wrote a book). But it isn't exactly ranked high by employees [0].

Also may want to explain what ブラック企業 means. I can take an educated guess but I'm not 100% certain I'm right.

[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=http://...

Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#24

Post by modfodder »

rl3 wrote: post #21
anpk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a 2004 book on his philosophy, he questioned Japanese people’s increasing tendency to value leisure time. That makes one of us.

To further expand on this: > When Inamori talks about making employees happy, he doesn’t mean they’ll be putting their feet up. His brand of happiness comes from working harder than anyone else. It’s infused with the Buddhist idea of “shojin,” elevating the soul through devotion to a task. That's nice and all, but not if it comes at the expense of employee leisure time or pay.

As a freelancer I'm devoted to my task of maximizing the amount of leisure time.

Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#25

Post by beedyg »

vidarh wrote: post #17
beedyg wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> His turnaround also cut roughly a third of the airline’s workforce, about 16,000 people. At first glance that looks an awful lot like bullying the hen

He also returned the company to profitability, and brought it back out of bankruptcy, without which it's very much possible that all of the staff rather than "just" 1/3 would have had to find new jobs. It's perfectly possible he could have managed without, or with fewer, redundancies, but pointing to redundancies as evidence he's not thinking of staff is short-sighted. It sucks to have people lose jobs, but the solut…

If one assumes that the 1/3 job losses were 'trimming the fat', I'd still argue that enforced liposuction constitutes bullying (if not outright assault).

The decision to cut the workforce may have been the right one but since the thrust of the article was the effectiveness of his philosophy I think it's only fair to highlight how it was applied.

Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#27

Post by fweespeech »

ekianjo wrote: post #10
Amorymeltzer wrote: post #3

Say what you will, but >After taking the CEO role without pay, he printed a small book for each staff member on his philosophies, which declared that the company was devoted to their growth. >"Company leaders should seek to make all their employees happy, both materially and intellectually," Inamori said. I'd take a pay cut to work at a place like that. Enjoying your work, feeling like you will be taken care of, and…

Im really doubtful whether employees are actually happy working there. Never heard of Kyocera being anywhere nesr tge top of Best Places to Work surveys adressing employees satisfaction. This sounds like a big PR piece with no fact to support any claim.

My current employer will never show up on a "Best Places to Work" survey either but its still the best employer I've ever had.

Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#29

Post by scotty79 »

Shares are just tokens that can appreciate and depreciate in value (not unlike bitcoin). Price of shares usually has nothing to do with condition or more importantly future of the company. It depends solely on whim of people who have too much money and time and noting better to do with those.

Idea that the company should be managed in a way that would raise the price of shares is silly. Trading shares is a game and what company does after making shares available for purchase serves only as random seed for share price.

There are two parts to stock market. One is providing capital to companies. Selling shares is a way to do that. But not many people would buy shares because growing companies is risky and slow business. It would be only as attractive as buying shares just for the dividend. Thus we need a twist to make things more interesting so that people will act against their own interest. Proven thing that makes people part with their money is a lottery so we change shares into sort of token that players can trade between themselves. Heard behaviors provides the necessary randomness and the thrill. And that's how and why of stock market.

Attempts to further sync the game with the reality are stupid, harmful and unnecessary.

Re: The Buddhist Priest Who Became a Billionaire Snubbing Investors

#30

Post by dragonwriter »

hugh4 wrote: post #15
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rarely hear complaints of companies that have neglected their shareholders in favor of their employees, while the reverse is endemic. When the scales are overbalanced this badly, you need to give them a firm shove, not carefully add equal weights to both side.

The fact that you don't hear about it is largely because employees tend to be better at whining to the media when they don't get their way than shareholders. The American landscape is littered with many large companies which have gone bankrupt by giving in to all their employees' demands at the cost of profitability. The big airlines, for instance. And the carmakers.

> The fact that you don't hear about it is largely because employees tend to be better at whining to the media when they don't get their way than shareholders.

The fact that you don't hear about it is, rather, because shareholders have voting rights to control important decisions, including board selection, and the board supervises management, as well as corporations having legally-enforceable fiduciary duties to shareholders.

So, if a company is not adequately representing shareholder interests, they have more efficient mechanisms available to correct that than "whining to the media", as a result of which, management is generally responsive to demands that come from a substantial fraction of the shareholders in ways which they may not be to employee demands.

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