Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it and later turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!

Over time, Son realised there were three main approaches to inventing things:

  • The first was searching for solutions to problems. Whenever a problem or hardship cropped up in life, Son looked for a way to resolve the issue. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. Pencils with a completely rounded body would tend to roll off the table when set down – much to his annoyance – so the workaround solution to this would be to make pencils with a square-shaped or hexagonal body instead. Then, after identifying the problem, he applied deductive reasoning to come up with a solution.
  • The second approach was lateral thinking, or looking at things from the opposite perspective. Take something which is traditionally round and make it square. Turn something that has always been red, white. Take something big and make it small. Son applied this approach to his idea for a new type of traffic light. It would use the same design and colours everyone was used to, but throw geometrical shapes into the mix, with circles, triangles and squares used for the various signals. In this way colour-blind people would be able to tell which phase the light was in.
  • The third approach was combining pre-existing things. Take a radio and a tape recorder, combine them and voilà: the radio cassette player. Most of the inventions Son came up with in America fell under this third category, as he could systematically come up with things this way.

Son was 19, in his third year at university and in the prime of his youth. Most university students would be busy with their studies, sport or going out on dates. Within the broader scope of a person’s whole life, however, what exactly does it mean to be 19? Son’s guiding principles would be unimaginable for the ordinary person: he already had a 50-year life plan he was intent on following.

  • Phase 1 was to set up a company in his twenties – the exact industry didn’t matter at all. It was all about creating an identity and if he could manage this then all of his youthful ambition would have paid off.
  • Phase 2 was far more outlandish – delusional even – and that was to amass a war chest of 100 billion yen.
  • Phase 3 – his forties – would involve challenging a big company for market dominance.
  • Phases 4 and 5 – his fifties and sixties – were to be spent ensuring the success of his business and then passing it on to the next chief executive. 

A 19-year-old with this sort of foresight and life plan was truly unprecedented and typical of his anything-but-average youth, which would explain his drive and obsession to get things done, and now.

‘For every new day, a new invention.’ Surprisingly, Son had managed to pull his invention scheme off, thanks largely to combining pre-existing things into something new. To facilitate this, he had written down random nouns in English – ‘tangerine’, ‘spike’, ‘memory’ – on cards. Once he had amassed a deck of around 300 cards, he would pull three out of the stack, turn them over, and then see whether or not the words he had chosen could be combined into a new product. The three words could be completely nonsensical together, but could still produce good ideas, no matter how eccentric. For a historical precedent, the 19th-century poet Comte de Lautréamont (a contemporary of Rimbaud’s) would take two things which at first glance had nothing in common – say, a sewing machine and an umbrella – and then combine them to create a unique idea, effectively kick-starting the surrealist movement.

Whilst manually turning the cards over, the thought occurred to Son that there should be a more systematic way of performing such a task – or better yet a way of getting a computer to do it. A computer would certainly be able to come up with inventions more easily and efficiently. In the 1970s, however, not just anyone could program a computer – if they even had access to one – and at any rate, they would need to know the ins and outs of the machine for his plan to work. The first issue – accessing a computer – was easy enough at Berkeley, so he stepped into the 24-hour computer lab and started feeling out the possibilities. It was common for students in the computer lab to chat to each other with any questions or sticking points they came across, as well as swapping information. They kept their stomachs full on milk and bread, and if they got tired would have a quick kip in a sleeping bag they’d brought. What was unique about Son’s approach to utilising a computer was the fact he was using it to generate ideas as opposed to using it as a glorified calculator. First, he would create a computer program where he could input the cost of the individual ‘parts’ – the concepts he had written on his cards. Additionally, he would rate each part for newness out of 10, for size out of 5, and then rate his own knowledge of the part out of 30, before keying these figures in. Or perhaps he would set a figure for how relevant this was to the invention – ultimately, he ended up with around 40 elements to enter into the computer. The lab supervisor was intrigued by what Son was getting up to – it was the first time he had ever seen a student use a computer for creative purposes. He submitted his computer program as part of a free project required as part of his computer science class and received an A. The program would be pulling three ‘cards’ out of a pool of 300 – how many hundreds of thousands of possibilities would come out? Then for each card, the computer would calculate a score using each rating as entered, lastly providing a list of the elements with the highest scores presented first.

Within Japanese society discrimination was superficially denied as being non-existent although, in truth, it had just manifested in less obvious ways; intentionally and openly using a Korean surname would prove disadvantageous from the start, if not an outright hindrance within the business world. His family only wanted their young son coming back from years away in America to fully grasp the actual reality of Japan, the more insular of the two countries. Son would not be dissuaded from his approach, however. In America – the country where he had effectively grown up – no one was bothered about anyone else’s nationality and Son had no time for Zainichi Koreans being overly self-conscious about their bloodlines. He was not afraid; having tasted the freedoms afforded him in America, he was going to carry on living as such. He was a Korean, living in Japanese society. Later on, Son would admit to having problems accessing a Japanese passport as a Korean citizen, leading him to fully naturalise. ‘A nationality is just a mark or a brand. I pay taxes here in Japan and as a citizen I have rights too.’ Acquiring Japanese nationality, however, is not a simple process and the Ministry of Justice initially refused Son’s application, on the basis that Son was not a Japanese surname. There was no precedent and Son was told in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to naturalise, he would have to change his name. Son – somewhat anticipating this – put his secret plan into action. In Korea, a wife does not take her husband’s surname (as is traditionally the case in Japan) and Masami’s surname was still Ono – her maiden name – at this time. Son had her go to the courts and apply for a change of name, taking on his own surname. On his second application, Son went back to the Ministry of Justice and asked them to look into whether or not there was anyone of Japanese nationality with the surname Son. If there was in fact a precedent, then his application would be accepted. Having conducted his search, the official responded stating they had indeed found someone – his wife. From that point onwards, Son Masayoshi would live his life as a Japanese national.

In the 1980s in Japan, start-up companies were unheard of and there were questions running round Son’s head concerning how exactly he was going to develop his company. He had founded a company, but it was really only a company in name only – something for Son to bide his time with until he could make up his mind about which of the number of markets in Japan he wanted to sink his teeth into. Company results were next to nil. In Son’s mind, since he was doing business in Japan, there was no point in bothering unless he was going to be a market leader. He set about gathering up data whilst making his plans, immediately coming up with over 20 business ideas. Researching whether each was a viable option would take time, so Son employed one full-time staff member as well as one part-timer.

At the time Son had zero income: he had precisely nothing coming in and felt like he was traversing a tunnel with no actual exit. He was growing anxious. Once he had settled on what he wanted to do, there’d be no turning back or even changing lanes later. He’d choose his market and then aim straight for the top. The trouble was, Son was completely obsessed by the first hurdle, but wasn’t entirely certain about which angle to approach that hurdle from. ‘Due to inertia I was at a point where I didn’t want to decide my own fate – but doing things half-heartedly was not an option.’ Son was faced with choices. Even if he could immediately hit upon a market he was interested in trading in, after 10 years he was certain he’d hit a plateau, at which point he’d have to change sectors, and that wasn’t what he wanted to do. Son pulled one of his notebooks from university out – it contained methods and principles he’d learnt along the way. He decided to write down whatever popped into his head: making a list of his thoughts – or rather absolute conditions – for selecting a market to get into.

  • There’s no point in doing business if you’re not taking a gamble on something.
  • Has the sector got room for growth in future?
  • In 50 years’ time will this be something I would want to completely lose myself in?
  • It shouldn’t require obscene amounts of start-up capital.
  • I’m young, so whatever it is I can do it.
  • In future I’m going to be the core that a business group revolves around.
  • I want to do something completely unique that no one else in business has ever thought of before.
  • Even if it’s slow going for the next 10 years, I want to be the best in my sector in Japan.
  • The key to business success is believing you’re making people happy.
  • In the latter half of the 20th century, the world will change by leaps and bounds.  There were 25 such statements on his list.

Taken at face value, they would constitute a completely obvious business management philosophy, but where Son stands apart here is how – for the purpose of making his decision – he assigned each statement its own index number. For each individual line of business he created a stack of papers over 30cm tall, and with 40 different lines if you piled them one on top of the other, they would have stood a dozen metres tall.

Son was prepared to devote his entire life to the one scoring highest, going by the system he devised. Standing on top of a makeshift podium made out of tangerine boxes and under the tin roof of his office, Son began pontificating to an audience of his one full-time employee and his one part-time worker. ‘Profits will have to be ten billion yen in five years, then fifty billion yen in ten years. Eventually I want to be able to count profit in trillions of yen.’ His two employees listened to him carry on in silence, but having to listen to Son babble on about his ambitions on a daily basis like a man possessed soon became intolerable and the two would quit. If a comparison could be drawn with Son at this point, it would be with the character of Don Quixote. With one difference however: Don Quixote was a knackered old man gallivanting about La Mancha whilst Son had only just turned 24. Something fierce was welling up inside of him.

It was close to midnight when the two met in Nagata-cho in Tokyo and, as soon as Son saw Okubo, he promptly asked him point blank again to go into business with him with the words, ‘Want to get married?’ Okubo looked into Son’s eyes. He was deadly serious. Little wonder then that Okubo, a battle-hardened entrepreneur, was caught off-guard for a moment. ‘The hell’s wrong with you, man?’ Okubo would later recall his impression of this meeting in an interview for this book. ‘Anyone else I would have told them to do one right then and then but . . . Son has got a strange charm about him, hasn’t he?’ Those who have met Son – and particularly those who have had business dealings – are all unanimous in mentioning that ‘strange charm’. ‘Have you heard of the concept of C&C (computers and communications)?’ Son asked. ‘Right now I’d say SoftBank Japan are probably the top computer company in Japan, but in terms of communications Shin Nihon Kohon are second only to NTT. And shouldn’t top companies go into business together? Hence my asking you whether or not you’d be interested in wedding your company to mine.’ Son could talk a mile a minute. ‘Have you heard about the new common carriers? They’ve very much to do with your field of business, after all. The thing is, however, if you haven’t got computers involved then you may as well not get into the field – so what do you do about that problem? Well, I’ve got a really good idea in this respect, but what do you say?’

Son never tires of speaking about Claure and how he reflects his own philosophy about business. ‘In any company you certainly need your hunters, but by the same stroke you also need your chefs. However much an art form preparing food may be, though, if you’ve not got hunters going out there and bringing the raw ingredients in then your chefs are going to have a lot of time on their hands and there won’t be much in anyone’s stomach! But then again, someone has got to prepare and dress what your hunters catch and both roles are important. But if you had to choose one it all starts with the hunters, and hunting is an eternally risky business.

‘There’ll be times where a hunter will find himself out in the fields in the hunt and nothing will come along or they won’t be able to capture their prey and it will be a year, having only set off with their rifle and enough food for three days. If they can’t catch something within those three days then they won’t be eating and under those conditions they’re forced to do everything it takes to track and capture their prey. It takes courage to do that, it takes extraordinary decision-making skills to survive under those conditions. It’s a risky business, it’s a duel to the death almost. ‘Put another way, a street fighter isn’t someone like a boxer, who’s doing their fighting in a ring with the laws of the sport governing what they can and can’t do. There’s quite a vast difference between someone like a professional boxer or a judoka at the Olympics where the fights are all lit up, and someone in a brawl in a back alley somewhere, where the fight isn’t confined to a ring. In that sort of fight you don’t know what the other person’s going to resort to, so everything’s fair game in that sense. I’m not saying we don’t care about playing by the rules, just that the business world is like one giant bar brawl in that you constantly have to deal with the unexpected, either in terms of who you’re squaring up against or what weapons they’ve brought to the fight. Whenever something unexpected like this comes up you’ve got to decide right then and there how you’re going to deal with the matter and then leave everything to your own reflexes. There’s no time for parleying or reaching a consensus – what good would that be in a bar brawl?

‘This is precisely why people from administration don’t make good chief executives, why companies never experience any growth under them. Using the analogy from before, administrators are the chefs. In business you’ve got to go on the attack. If you look at conservative companies in the mould of the Japanese Business Federation and why they’ve got zero growth potential it’s because the heads of the planning department and senior administrators have all become the decision-makers. ‘These sorts are only good at managing internal affairs and in terms of promotion as long as you don’t actively fail you could be promoted to chief executive as long as you stick around. You can’t afford to take that approach in business any more. They’re only good at renovating the same old ways of turning a profit, they aren’t looking ahead to the next big thing and investing in it – because they’re the last of their kind. They’re a hopeless case – all they can really do is brag about how great they once were.’