There are industrialists other than those who are born with a silver spoon in their mouths, force-feed their shareholders and rub shoulders with political power. This was the message of Kazuo Inamori, a Japanese high-tech industrialist and Buddhist monk, expressed in numerous books translated into 21 languages and printed in 19 million copies. He died in Kyoto on August 24 at the age of 90.
Born on January 30, 1932 in Kagoshima, at the southern tip of Japan, far from Tokyo, he not only came from a large family whose house had been destroyed by an American air raid, but he had only been able to attend school through a scholarship, and by making and selling paper bags. The strength of Japan at that time was also in its small universities. He passed a bachelor’s degree in applied chemistry in Kagoshima, where his taste for science and machines flourished.
He managed to get a job in Kyoto, as a researcher in a medium-sized ceramic company for industry. But his successes in products and patents did not earn him the recognition of the management: after four years, in 1959, he slammed the door with seven colleagues and founded with them, at the age of 27, Kyoto Ceramic, soon abbreviated to Kyocera. This start-up grows by gradually developing some very new principles: projects stubbornly matured in dreams and discussion; repeated innovation resulting in unparalleled products; the refusal of the usual precepts of a centralized management in favor of an organization in small cells responsible for their purchases and their profits, measured in a homogeneous way; the rejection of a single, Japanese client in favor of a varied and international clientele, primarily American; finally, the refusal to invest his profits in the purchase of land, as advised by his banker, and a continuous investment in factories and equipment.
Innovative and ethical management
Anxious to avoid dependence on semiconductors, Inamori diversified its products towards photovoltaic cells, cutting tools and bioceramics, then, through mergers and acquisitions, towards portable computers and their peripherals, finally towards telecommunications. He was now at the head of a multinational listed on the stock exchange in Japan and New York, with, in an equally unusual way, four Americans on his board.
Looking for new markets where everything had to be invented by leaving his comfort zone was at the heart of the second part of his career. In 1984, when Japan, under American pressure, deregulated its long-distance fixed telephone market, it brought together 225 companies to create DDI, a private rival to the public monopoly, and chose microwaves to build a competing network. In 1995, during the deregulation of the mobile phone market, DDI entered it, then formed another alliance: in 2000, KDDI quickly became the second mobile operator in Japan.
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