In today’s competitive business landscape, companies often focus their innovative power on creating new products or technologies, but forget to prioritize the most important aspect: creating unique value for their customers. I recently read a book キーエンス 高付加価値経営の論理 on Keyence’s value-added approach and how it contributes to its high profit margin....
2023 is coming to a close and in the same tradition, I decided to tally my book reviews. This year presented me with a big challenge. I was diagnosed with a serious illness and had to go through treatment and surgery for half of the year. This period was like a trekking expedition when I had a lot of solo time during pain and suffering to ponder and self-reflect. My...
Try envisioning design as water. Water is indispensable to human life, connecting us to our environments in visible and invisible ways. It can cause disasters like tsunamis (and so can design when it is uncalled for or when it tries to add nonexistent value), but it can also materialize as a rainbow, radiant in the light of the sun. Just as water makes every phenomenon possible, design is an essential component of every human endeavor....
Who are temple carpenters and what do they do? If you have travelled to Japan, you must have visited a traditonal temple or two that was built several hundred years ago. And if you ventured into ancient capitals such as Nara or Kyoto, chances are that you’ve shared ground with a wooden structure that have stood over a millenium. The book Ki no ichi Ki no kokoro ( 木の...
2022 has passed and it’s time to do some cleaning up and recap. Since I’ve implemented my book tracker system, I’ve been taking a more structural approach to manage my learnings (notes, to-do-next, rating, time spent on each book, time-to-revisit, etc). Here’s a quick glance at what I enjoyed most last year. Time is medicine Time is medicine is written by Hiruma Eiko, a Guiness-certified oldest pharmacist to prescribe advice...
Why am I here? What should I do now? These questions come to our minds from time to time, regardless of what stage of life we are in. We play many roles every day. We may be students, looking forward to improving our studies and securing a good job after graduation. We may be children, trying to live in harmony with our parents. We may also be team members, working jointly to finish a project on time to satisfy our boss or client....
“The Drowned and the Saved” is the last book from Holocaust survior and writer Primo Levi, published shortly before his suicide in 1987. In this book, he attempted to address the questions “why atrocities happened” and “how to prevent them from happening again”. In different chapters, he distilled his experiences in the camp to explore the fluidity (he termed it “the grey zone”) in human characters, the fragility of perceived memory as well as the state of mind of those in the camps....
What is Danshari Danshari is a mental model pioneered by Hideko Yamashita via a book series in the 2000s, as a way to organize our lives by making deliberate choices. Per Yamashita, she got the idea from her yoga practice and a pilgrimage stay in Koyasan. I used the term mental model and not housekeeping tactics because I truly believe that this has far more practicality beyond just organizing our...
Are these scenarios common to us or those around us? We want to create an app that millions will download and use everyday. We want to write a blog post that will be cross-linked from all popular sites and social media accounts. We spend so much time over-planning that we postpone starting the actual work. Once we actually sit down and work, we are shocked by the stark reality and keep stumbling upon blocks after blocks....