listen to Mogic's thoughts

mountain root

There is a lot of management, but I leave some of it to everyone else and focus on my part. I do a little bit of accounting closing once a month, check the monthly closing documents, check various data in our system, and discuss with the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and Executive Officer.
Invoices, credit card payments, and deposits are triple-checked by the chief executive officer, executive officers, back office, and accounting firm. The flow of money is transparent, so you can easily see when a board member spends company money for himself. Or rather, it's a system where you can't.
Then we look at the monthly balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement. I have been taking data for a long time, so I sometimes make comparisons with the past. The numbers can reveal interesting things, so I use Excel to create new indicators and simulations.

mountain root

Fujii is well versed in the latest global technologies and the trends of top overseas engineers, so after listening to him for a while, we discuss the big picture, and I tell him about things that are not well known at the moment but will probably become major. Then there are things like the potential of the service and the new possibilities for the members, which are so varied that it's hard to give a specific one. Anyway, I enjoy talking with Fujii because he is not like an engineer, and he has done martial arts in the past and is good with his hands, making all kinds of things.

mountain root

I talk with them once a week for about an hour. We make a simple agenda, which takes about 5 minutes to complete, and then we discuss what we have noticed in each of us. We discuss what we have noticed in each of the participants. Rather than talking with management in mind, we are just joking around.

mountain root

When the company was five years old, I once made a list of all the work I was doing. Then I realized that I was doing a lot of things. It would be hard to do all these things all the time, and it could become a black box, so I decided to give a little of it to other teams and members every year. It means that I have distributed the management work that I was doing to the chiefs, the executive officers, and the system. It will be a little bit more work, but I think it is a good thing for all of us, if we think about it all the way forward.

mountain root

A long time ago, I helped fund a startup and noticed something. Generally speaking, the top management of a startup is energetic and the members are working hard. However, the management in the middle is not so strong. That is true. Because the top management pulls the strings, middle management is not needed and is not nurtured.
However, after a few years, a start-up company wants to have a management team that can be trusted, so it spends money to increase its capital. That's one thing, but I thought it would be easier to nurture management from the beginning. It is hard to headhunt management, and people who were able to work at other companies would not immediately fit into Mogic's culture.
So, from the beginning, I treated the members as if they could manage someday. I would attend interviews with them and share with them what to look for and what to overlook, or talk with them about how they should behave when trouble occurs. I believe that many of our members can manage well because they have accumulated these experiences over the past 10 years.

mountain root

At first, you use common cloud services, but along the way you inevitably reach the limits of efficiency and utility. If the company is one big system, each service becomes a bottleneck.
Even if you eliminate the bottleneck, it will get stuck again in a different part of the cloud service. After repeating this process, someone says, "Oh, it's getting tedious," and we say, "Well, let's rebuild it all together," and so we build it from scratch. Surprisingly, if they continue to do this, they lose management work. So, I guess you could call it decentralization of management.

mountain root

To put it very simply, it's a place where you can bring together people you don't know if it's a company. That's the best part. In a company, you can say, "Gather interesting people! but if you say, "Gather interesting people here on your day off," they won't gather! on your day off, you won't be able to get together. So a company is a great way to gather people who can have fun together.

mountain root

I don't have much. But I still thought it was tough when I had to think about how to make money.

mountain root

The best time is when we have created and launched a service that we believe in. The most difficult time for us is when we are groping in the dark, such as when we are complaining that the service does not sell at all for about a year after its release, or when we are thinking of stopping the service and creating the next one. The money was running out, and the service was not getting any results.
I didn't like it at the time, but strangely enough, it becomes a pleasant memory in the present. It is a memory that we can all enjoy together, like "We were reckless at that time, weren't we? I also realized during the course of the project that it was no good because I was under the illusion that it was a money problem.

mountain root

This is already a matter of personal character, but I think I am weaker in ordinary times when nothing is going on. I am the type of person who can be active in a pinch or in a crisis situation, so I guess I appear to be more energetic.

mountain root

I guess I can't be stable. It's like you can't survive without starting something on your own and causing upheaval. So, it might be tougher if our branded service LearnO sells well or if we feel that our management has stabilized. For a moment, I think there might not be anything to do.
Once you have done everything necessary for the company to function, including sales, marketing, branding, accounting, finance, recruiting, training, management, product development, security, and compliance, you have to challenge yourself to do things that most companies have not done before. At first, you don't understand that, and then you have to talk about how to create more turbulence on top of stability. I think it will be tough to break through that point.

mountain root

I think that the ones that have a goal for the project and a fixed starting point may be hard, but they are easy. Because you just have to do it. I think it is fun while you are doing it. Because if you do it quietly, you can finish it. Even if you don't finish, you can set a goal that if you can manage this, you would like to eat delicious food.
However, it is quite difficult to feel as if you have to do something even though you don't have to do it, because you don't need a goal. The president is at the top of the company, and he or she decides what to do next. Everyone follows him or her, saying what is good and what is bad.
But when you get right down to it, the president is not told by anyone. They are not told to "do it quickly" or "think about what to do next. This is especially true if you are doing business with your own capital, as we are. In other words, you have to discipline yourself so that you can look forward by yourself, and you have to walk step by step where there is nothing, and there is no goal and no reward. There is no goal and no reward. In the end, I like that too (laughs).

mountain root

People often say that being a manager is lonely, that you have a lot of responsibility, and that if you make a mistake, you might go off the rails. I have never thought that. I have never felt lonely, nor have I ever wanted to quit because of too much responsibility. I have never felt lonely, nor have I ever wanted to quit because of too much responsibility.
I have always had a hard time doing things that have a fixed framework, such as textbooks and tests. There is no frame of reference in management. That's why I am good at it. I prefer open world games.

mountain root

Yes, I do. Whenever I have even the slightest idea, I start at that moment. If I think of something, I do it anyway, when I realize it. When I do it, I think, "I don't know, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it, but I did it.
And then I show it to everyone and hope they find it interesting, but as soon as I put it out there, they get bored with it, so I come up with something different again. I don't know what it is, but I try it out, and then I get stuck.
I get stuck, but I am working on several things at the same time, so even if I get stuck on this one, I can always find a way around it by doing that one. If I am working on something else, suddenly I can make progress on this one. That is why I do so many different things. I guess that's why I don't find it hard in the end.

mountain root

At the time we established the company, we looked at various companies to see what kind of companies were out there. I looked at them, but since we were going to build a company as our own vessel, we wanted to do things freely. I thought it would be troublesome to go to the trouble of copying them.
First of all, we have to carefully observe, analyze, formulate a hypothesis, and then copy it in our own way. It is not possible to catch up by copying, and what to do after copying is done is also a hassle. There are people who say that you can just copy the exact same thing without thinking, but I don't do that because I think it will be difficult later on if you do it even though the foundation and background are different.
Instead, I think it would be faster and easier to find out what the essence is and try to go the shortest distance to it, but there doesn't seem to be a way to do it yet, so I'll just invent it anyway.

mountain root

As I mentioned earlier, a company has the right and the place to gather interesting people. If we decide to work together, we want them to feel that the time spent together was fun, interesting, and a valuable experience in their lives. How you feel about it is a personal matter, but the place where you work will have a large impact, so I place importance on creating a place where everyone can enjoy themselves.
It may be easy to say, "Set goals and do this and do that," but it is also troublesome. What I mean by "tedious" is the difficulty of having to keep telling them to do it all the time. In the case of raising children, it is hard to keep telling them to do their homework, clean up, and take a bath.

mountain root

Instead, it would be better to create a place where they would want to do their own homework, do their homework naturally, wash their tea bowls after eating, do their homework, and then take a bath. It doesn't matter if the order is different, but I would prefer it that way. If I had to figure out how to do it, I would have to understand in more detail, "What is it about human beings, what do they like and dislike, what are they conscious and unconscious of, what makes this person different?
Because human beings are multifaceted, it is possible for a person to make such a decision in this situation, but to become a different personality in this situation. In other words, depending on the situation, there may be people who accidentally misbehave. Therefore, we understand the possibility that these situations may cause such a situation and the multifaceted nature of human beings, and we think about how to create an environment in which it is easy to create a positive atmosphere and less likely to have a negative impact.

mountain root

I don't think about numbers. I was told to try making a budget in the past, and I did it once, but while it was a lot of work to manage, it didn't go according to plan at all.
It's no wonder. The schedule is undecided. In terms of sales, there are so many external factors that we cannot control. If we were to be happy or sad about that, it would be better to think about something else.
So, although we look at the results as a supplementary device, what is important is how to make the people who work with us feel that they had fun, grew, and had a good time. That is what I am thinking about.

mountain root

I believe that today's world is rather devoid of caring for others and care for others. I would say that care is undervalued.
For example, let's say you step on someone else's foot on the train and don't say "I'm sorry. You may be fine, but the other person is being shaved. If you say, "I'm sorry," the other person will be cared for, and you will not feel neglected, and your heart will be restored.
If all you do at your company is to push forward strongly with target numbers and performance, you have little time to think about how you can take care of others or how you can take care of yourself. People who can say that this is not the company's concern are strong and good, but the weak are the ones who will be cut off. When that happens, people quit the company or become distressed, so I think a certain percentage of people need to be taken care of.
Generally speaking, I don't think most companies provide such care. Nowadays, there are cases in which industrial physicians are present and conduct interviews, or supervisors conduct one-on-one interviews with their subordinates, but when you get right down to it, the interview is about whether or not the employee is performing for the company's goals, not about personal care. I think it's not about taking care of the individual.
However, Mogic is a company that we own, so I feel that it is normal for us to consider a person's situation and take care of them, even if it is a little meddlesome.

mountain root

As you know, we don't have kickoff meetings or morning meetings. I thought it would be better to make people feel that part of the message on a daily basis rather than just blurting it out at an event; rather than giving a 30-minute presentation once a month or telling people to look at the philosophy posted on the website, I thought it would be better to spread the message out over 30 days, one minute a day.
Then it becomes a question of how to design thin and short messaging. In the end, I think it comes down to what kind of actions managers are taking at what time. You build up a series of, "Oh, he's the kind of person who acts this way at that moment, this is what he does." Instead of one speech in a month, you get to see 30 or more actions and words in a month, and that's a lot more than a speech in a month.
The advantage is that I don't have to say, "You say nice things in your presentation, but that's not what you're actually doing. It's because it's not a presentation. The disadvantage is that there are many interpretations depending on who's watching, so it could be misunderstood. If that happens, I'll talk to them directly, but that rarely happens now.

mountain root

I know it doesn't sound good, but I don't have high expectations. I ask them to do a job on the assumption that it won't go well, and if they do 30%, that's good enough. If it's more than that, I'll say, "That's good! I think I ask for a backup plan based on the assumption of 30% output. If this pattern doesn't work out, I might use something else.
Suppose you receive a job where the other party's expectations are 100% of your work. Isn't that hard? You do your best and aim for 80%, but it may turn out to be 50%.

mountain root

To expand on this, when we ask someone to do a job, it is possible for the same person to perform 90% this week and 60% the following week. A team of five people can work together, and each person's performance can vary from week to week and day to day. They say that the chain breaks at the weakest link, so I think it would be nice if the dynamic around us could change to accommodate the person who is not performing the best. And next week it might be someone else.
On the other hand, why do we expect too much when we ask for a job? I would like to ask. A common story is that because I can do it this way now, I expect the other person to be able to do the same. But you and others have different ways of life, don't you? If you project your own scale onto the other person, you may end up cutting off the good qualities of the other person.
If your expectations are different from theirs, you have a chance to come up with a new plan! It is fun if you can think of it as a chance to come up with a new plan.

mountain root

I will ask a lot of questions about why it is not a good fit. If they still don't fit, I would tell them, "Perhaps you won't be able to use your strengths well in our company.

mountain root

If you have one person, you try to make ends meet; if you have two, you think about maximizing the other person's strengths; if you have five, you think about parallelizing multiple projects as a team; if you have 30 or more, you try to respect the culture and style of the company; and so on. The number of people increases gradually, so it seems like a continuum, but if you do it that way, it can get strange, so I try to switch gears quickly.

mountain root

After all, a manager's brain resources and time are limited. If you have a team of more than 30 people and your main job is to be a player, you don't need the title of manager, do you?

mountain root

It is difficult to create one division. How difficult is that it cannot be done overnight. Let's say you want to create a designer department. From the management's point of view, even if you tell them the mission that you want them to do this or that, they will not understand it. They may say "I understand" in words, but they do not seem to understand it in their bodies. Therefore, I try to help them understand what the division should have in their bodies.
I talk with the head of the department once a week for about six months or a year. We make a simple agenda, but the base is based on the assumption that we are going off on a tangent. We tell them what we want to talk about in the language of the world that the department head has. If we continue to do this, in my experience, we both feel a great deal differently after about three months. If we continue to talk further, and after six months or a year, we can reach an agreement, then a division is truly formed. Since they have a shared understanding of why this department exists, what it should be, and what it should do, the rest is up to them alone to create the culture of the department.
It may seem daunting because we don't do a top-down approach and say, "We've created a box called a department, and now it's up to you to take care of the rest.

mountain root

It was a backwards calculation. There seemed to be a product that the designer would like to see created as the main axis, so I wanted him to develop directional skills, which led me to art direction. A web director needs to have a sense of marketing, so market direction. In this way, the skills we wanted them to acquire were attached to the names of the divisions.

mountain root

I never had anyone teach me. I started by writing down what I would lack if I were to run my own business, and then reading books and gaining experience to fill in the blanks. I even attended a seminar at the Chamber of Commerce just before starting my own business.
After all this time, I realized that there are a lot of things you don't understand until you get started. Before I started my business, I wondered why I couldn't find anything on the Internet or in books, but I guess there's no way to write about it because it's so different. 95% of what I learned was through trial and error from the very beginning.

mountain root

It's a daily thought. But it's the kind of idea that somehow subconsciously has been on my mind for several weeks or months, and somewhere along the line, it snaps together. I tell my members that I want to do this because I'm sure this is the right direction in the big picture. I don't like clean strategies, so I think it's a patchwork of ideas.

mountain root

Strengths and weaknesses are relative. There are yardsticks and benchmarks to understand them. That is why, in the past, I received a lot of statistical data from a major accounting firm. The statistics included profit and loss statements and balance sheets for hundreds of companies in each industry, and they were divided into good, normal, and poor categories. I used them as a reference because I could see their position in the IT industry and how they compare to other industries.
Also, analyzing strengths and weaknesses is a method often used by consulting companies, so I sometimes do a rough qualitative check using this and that framework. I sometimes use frameworks to do a rough qualitative check.

mountain root

We leave the decision making and progress to the managers of all projects, not just the main services. This is more efficient because there are so many of them, and we don't have access to detailed information on the ground. Sometimes I give my opinion from the side, but it is more like someone else's opinion than the president's, so sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't. I don't really care. I don't really mind. The general direction of the project is communicated here and there, so I think they are making their selections in accordance with that.

mountain root

Decisions are made through discussions at Risk Management Committee meetings and Executive Board meetings. The decisions are made at weekly or monthly meetings, such as "This cost is a bit high," or "Let's create a new tool. The president does not make decisions on his own, and every idea is discussed and shared among several people before proceeding.

mountain root

If there are quotas and goals, productivity increases, and everyone is having fun, we will introduce them, but I wonder if it is because in the long run they tend to veer in a negative direction. People do not grow or achieve results in a linear fashion; they go up and down. Therefore, if you put a goal or quota that has a linear nature to it, there will always be times when it cannot be achieved in a stochastic manner. It sounds good to say that because you can't achieve it, you can reflect on it and make the most of it the next time, but I really doubt that will be the case. Personally, I don't like reflection very much. And so we have made it this far.

mountain root

If your workflow is fixed, you might want to create goals. Because once you set a goal, your team will rigidify their style toward it for several months. For better or for worse. But if you say, "Let's do something new every day," or "We received this information today, so let's do that," it's harder to get things done because you have a goal. Therefore, I think it is easier to proceed with the approach we seek if there are no goals. Instead, the quality of each communication will become more important.

mountain root

Let's say someone asks someone to do a job for them. Some people say, "Okay, do it this way, it's written here," and others say, "Okay, I understand. Don't miss it. I see. What happens if you miss the most important part? That's because there will be a lot of rework after the work is completed, which will cut into future time. The former is correctly requesting work on the spot, while the latter is speaking from the reality of future operations. I feel that even an exchange of just a few minutes could make a big difference to the future.
I don't like lists and backlogs very much, and I have never run a team with them. Even when I make proposals and specifications, it's only minimal.

mountain root

If I had to name one important thing, it would be spontaneity. After all, I think the desire to lead everyone and start something on your own is quite risky. If you fail because you take the lead, people will laugh at you and say, "Oh, you failed," or "You did such a stupid thing. I think it is the spontaneity to be able to ignore such things.
There are 100 people in the group, and if you count them, I think there are more passive people than active. However, someone has to take the lead, and the person who can fulfill that role is the manager. I think it would be manageable if they had the initiative to do something on their own, to take responsibility, and to push forward with shame.
If not, and you have a president who is passive, right? You don't want to be told, "Well, that's for you to decide," no matter what you say.

mountain root

It's troubling, isn't it? So, somewhere in the back of their minds, people are thinking, "It's okay to fail, after all, I want them to keep pushing forward. You can't teach the part of pulling forward, so I think spontaneity is important.

mountain root

The other thing is the ability to read the future. Even if a person is spontaneous and can take a lot of actions, if his/her foresight is not good enough, he/she will waste a lot of moves.
I often use the analogy of a target 10 meters away, and if a person with 2.0 eyesight and a person with 0.1 eyesight have the same archery skills, which one will hit the target more often? If they had the same technique, the 2.0 person would hit the target. This is because they have a clear view of the target.
In the same way, if the ability to narrow down the target in the future does not improve, it is easy to lead everyone astray, like the flute player in Hamelin. If it's just you, you can get by with poor accuracy, but not when you're at the head of 10 or 20 people. I think it's important to be able to see with a certain degree of accuracy, because people might say, "Well, it started out well, but then I realized I was taken to a strange place.
In reality, it is not one stationary target, but many targets with different distances are being added at the same time, so you have to dynamically shift gears as you watch.

mountain root

I think there are parts of the future that I can see and control and parts that I cannot control at all. So, first of all, I have to make a clear distinction between the two.
For example, conflicts may occur someday, but we do not know when. However, the declining birthrate and aging population are easy to understand. The population will not suddenly increase next year. It is an easy foundation to control in the sense that the future is easy to predict. I think about what can be built on such controllable numbers and events.
The reason why Mogic provides IT education services is because we know that there will be fewer people in Japan and other developed countries with declining birthrates and aging populations. If there are fewer people, it is necessary to increase productivity per person, and education becomes very important. It is worth doing, and the market will not become obsolete because there is a need for it, and it will expand slowly. Therefore, I think it is important to identify what is sure to come and to focus on it to the extent that we can understand it.

mountain root

Those two things may be necessary for an entrepreneur, so I would venture to add balance. It would be easy if there were only two things to do, but there are so many elements such as accounting, finance, marketing, sales, design, engineering, direction, public relations, branding, recruiting, education, research and development, etc., that it is difficult to keep a good balance. If you are biased toward one area, there will be a hole somewhere.
If you come from a sales background, you will spend most of your time on sales, and if you come from an engineering background, you will focus on development. The reality is that things move, and the balance will soon be upset. It is a good thing that it does, because it will be upset, and you will have to reassess your center of gravity and rebalance yourself again. If it is too stable, it is not good, and if it is too unstable, it is not good, so you have to get it just right.
It is also important to balance potential, teamwork, leadership, communication, and happiness.
As a side note, if you are an IT manager, I think it is better to be a pain in the ass. An engineer once told me that a good engineer is a pain in the ass. They want to write programs to make things easier because they are troublesome. They try to write as little code as possible, so the workload of the entire team is reduced and maintenance is easier. So I think we need to be sympathetic to that. I think it is different to be evaluated because you worked overtime, spent a lot of time, and wrote a long code.

mountain root

If the problem is easy to understand, it can be quickly determined on site. However, problems that usually come to management for advice are those that involve trade-offs. If one side is good, the other side is bad. Or, they involve multiple stakeholders, or they are messy. It is a problem that cannot be easily untangled, so I think it is a problem that is coming up to be solved upstairs.
If it is, it is easy. You have to make trade-offs, but you can't untangle them because you want to do all of them well and you don't want to fail anywhere. So you have to discard.
What you throw away, what you painfully discard, what you painfully cut off, and then simplify and reassemble.

mountain root

It's the same thing. Clean up the situation while cutting down and unwinding. Problems that come up to management are supposed to be painful. But there is a pattern of cutting without properly grasping the whole picture of the pain and failing. So, the more difficult the problem is, the more we ask people other than those who came to us for advice, "What do you think of this? Then, after looking at the problem from various angles, I decide to cut off the pain, and then I just cut it off. After cutting off the information, the cross section becomes surprisingly simple, so we say, "Well, we can solve this problem now, can't we?

mountain root

Yes, I agree. I think it is quite difficult to make decisions that involve pain. So it is important to do that.

mountain root

I don't have any. Because I feel like I should just throw it away. I wonder if I am lost. Have you ever seen them lost?

mountain root

There are times when I ponder. Sometimes I gather information from various angles for a week or so and ponder. It's not like long thinking in chess. I have a feeling of "hmmm," but it is more like I am collecting information that is missing. I know how to make a cut, but I keep thinking about it just in case.

mountain root

You can hesitate and think about it for another week, but there will be a pattern where the risk increases if you hesitate for another week. In other words, the trend is getting worse and worse.
If you postpone the decision too long while the situation continues to worsen, the damage may increase at an accelerated rate. In fact, there are times when we need to make a preemptive move at an early stage without pondering for a week, so the limit is about a week, which is the limit at which people around us become impatient. Any longer than that and the situation is likely to deteriorate, and people will say, "Oh, he's so slow to make a decision, it's troubling. It's a matter of pulling it back to the best timing and coming to a conclusion.

mountain root

I don't have any ambitions because I don't have many goals to begin with. I don't have any ambitions, but every day I feel excited and a little nervous, and I always want to keep creating situations that challenge me.
I want to keep challenging myself to do new things. For example, I am being interviewed today. But you didn't even look at the list of questions beforehand, and you improvised everything. This is a little nerve-wracking. It's not that I have to say a certain thing, but I have to think about how to respond to the question in the moment. I hope I can continue to challenge myself to be on edge every day like that.
When you're running a company, it's surprisingly difficult to do that. Routine work increases, and it is easy to come up with things like, "The president has to be this way," "The president should not do this kind of work because he is the president," or "The president should do this. The president is told to decentralize authority, that his/her job is to make important decisions, and that he/she should create a system.
Well, I do that in my own way, but once the system is in place, there is no more than one decision to be made per month. In the past month, only one or two people came to the president's office for advice. There is almost no consultation, and everyone is thinking about what they are doing.
This is a good thing, but then the question becomes, what should the president do? He arrives after 8:00 in the morning and leaves at 5:00 in the evening. Even so, he has plenty of time, so he can't just sit idle. So, regardless of whether I am the president or the manager, I try to do whatever comes to my mind and make waves here and there.

mountain root

Thank you very much for your time here!