Items12The creator’s order
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Shibusawa EiichiBorn 16 Mar 1840Shibusawa helped found around 500 companies in the Meiji era, including Japan's first modern bank and stock exchange, but refused to build a family conglomerate of his own. His idea, set out in his book on the Analects and the abacus, was that profit should serve public good and that businesses…0i - 2
Sakichi ToyodaBorn 19 Mar 1867Toyoda, a carpenter's son, invented power looms and in 1924 an automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke, so one worker could watch many machines and faults were caught at once. That principle, building quality checks into the machine, became jidoka, one of the two pillars of the later…0i - 3
Taiichi OhnoBorn 29 Feb 1912Ohno, a Toyota production engineer, developed from the late 1940s the methods now called the Toyota Production System: making only what the next step needs, signalled by kanban cards, and treating overproduction, waiting and excess stock as waste. It let a cash-poor company compete with American…0i - 4
Kōnosuke MatsushitaBorn 27 Nov 1894Matsushita founded the company that became Panasonic in 1918 making electrical sockets, and in 1932 announced a 250-year mission to make goods as cheap and plentiful as tap water. He divided the company into semi-independent divisions in 1933, paired a wide dealer network with mass production, and…0i - 5
Soichiro HondaBorn 17 Nov 1906Honda, a mechanic who started by fitting small engines to bicycles in 1946, ran his company on engineering and racing rather than political connections, defying the trade ministry's wish to limit the number of carmakers. He split the work with his partner Takeo Fujisawa, who handled finance and…0i - 6
Akio MoritaBorn 26 Jan 1921Morita co-founded Sony with Masaru Ibuka in 1946 and insisted on selling under its own brand abroad, turning down a large 1955 order from an American retailer that wanted to put its own name on Sony radios. He moved to New York to learn the market and pushed products such as the Walkman over doubts…0i - 7
Hiroshi YamauchiBorn 7 Nov 1927Yamauchi took over his family's playing-card firm, Nintendo, in 1949 at 22 and, after failed ventures from taxis to instant rice, steered it into toys and video games. His rule was that hardware should be cheap and the games decisive, so he backed internal designers such as Shigeru Miyamoto and…0i - 8
Kazuo InamoriBorn 21 Jan 1932Inamori founded Kyocera in 1959 and ran it with amoeba management: the company split into small teams that each tracked their own revenue and costs per hour, so every employee could see their contribution to profit. He later founded the telecoms company that became KDDI, and in 2010, aged 78, took…0i - 9
Toshifumi SuzukiBorn 1 Dec 1932Suzuki brought 7-Eleven to Japan in 1973 as a licence from the American owner, over sceptics who said small shops could not survive against supermarkets. He built the chain on hypothesis-led ordering, with each store's staff placing several orders a day and checking them against sales data, and on…0i - 10
Tadashi YanaiBorn 7 Feb 1949Yanai took over his father's tailoring shop in Yamaguchi and opened the first Uniqlo in Hiroshima in 1984. He adopted the model of controlling design, manufacture and sale in one company, kept the range to well-made basics, and developed fabrics such as Heattech with the materials company Toray. He…0i
