Our First Book Recommendation

I don’t know how often I’ll recommend books here (most of what I want to share is common sense and genuine experience/lessons learned), but this is a bit out there compared to what you might see commonly recommended, and I think it’s worth getting in front of more eyeballs.

Satoru Iwata was President and CEO of Nintendo from 2002 to 2015, at which point he sadly passed at age 55 due to complications from bile duct cancer. Iwata’s accomplishments at HAL Laboratory and Nintendo speak for themselves, but most folks outside of the games industry might not be aware of just how innovative his management strategies were, particularly in Japan.

Ask Iwata is a 2021 book compiling anecdotes and quotes from various interviews and online publications. There are countless things to quote and focus on in its short 150-odd pages, but this really stuck out to me:

Iwata’s Advice

Interviewing every employee twice a year

When a company is in trouble, everything is an emergency. The thought on everybody’s mind is, “If we don’t finish this thing in a week, we’re toast!” However, once you declare bankruptcy, you’re able to slow down and take your time, allowing you to do the things you couldn’t do before.

For me, the thing I couldn’t do before was meeting every single employee and talking with each person one-on-one.

Once I did that, I made so many discoveries and realized that this should have been a top priority all along. Even once we had the company back on its feet and business returned to normal, I never gave up these dialogues with every member of the staff.

In my time as president of HAL Laboratory, I spoke with each employee twice a year. This sometimes meant as many as eighty or ninety individuals. The time varied per person, with some meetings as short as twenty minutes and some people talking for almost three hours. I kept this up for six or seven years.

Iwata later remarks, “Ask me what sort of company I would want to work for, and I would say ‘A place where my boss understands me’ or ‘A place where my boss cares about my quality of life.'”

Putting It Into Practice

There’s a lot to unpack and reflect on here. I would recommend you pick up the book, tear through it immediately (it’s a one- or two-sitting kind of book), and really give some thought to whether or not you “know” your employees. To Iwata’s point, knowing your employees doesn’t just make them feel better (recognized, seen, understood, etc.), but you will legitimately learn things about the business and organizational structure that you never would have organically learned on your own.

Just be careful not to turn it into that scene from Office Space where everyone thinks knows that they’re re-interviewing for their own, existing jobs.