Some wisdom seems so obvious when you hear it spoken aloud or read it on a page. It seems so obvious that you almost discount it, wondering why the author took the time to write it down.

Until you stop and think about it for a second and realize that even though it seems so obvious, so self-evident., even though it clicks immediately, so few people actually do it.

Ask Iwata is a collection of writings by Satoru Iwata, former President of Nintendo (among other things). One of these “obvious wisdoms” that you may have heard of is Iwata’s stance towards layoffs when he said:

If we reduce the number of employees for better short-term financial results, employee morale will decrease. I sincerely doubt employees who fear that they may be laid off will be able to develop software titles that could impress people around the world.

This seems obvious — scared employees in a creative industry won’t produce good work. And yet this obvious truth is almost always ignored. Nintendo is the exception.

Let’s look at a couple other obvious things that almost nobody does.

The power of 1 on 1 interviews

As president of Hal Laboratories (and later Nintendo), Iwata sat down with every employee twice a year for a one on one chat. When describing these interviews Iwata said:

As I sat down with each of the employees, I found that everybody touched on different themes. The only constant from one interview to the next was my opening question: “Are you happy doing what you’re doing?”
…when I asked people this question, they had all kinds of answers, as you can imagine.

Without mutual sympathy and understanding, I see no point in this kind of dialogue. Which is why if someone had complaints, I made sure to hear them out. However, as I listened to what they had to say, I would always speak up when I had something to say myself.

The more frustrated someone is, the more important it becomes to listen to them. Unless you make a point of this, anything you try to say goes in one ear and out the other…

Just these few paragraphs are full of those “obvious truths” that so few people do. Starting by asking people if they’re happy with what they’re doing. Making sure there’s mutual sympathy and understanding, hearing people out and also making yourself heard.

I could go on, but I love his explanation of how he knew to end the meeting. He talked about how people tend to have misunderstandings due to a number of factors tangled together that you have to “work through … one by one, rooting out the problem [until] everybody comes away feeling relieved.” That feeling of relief is what he waited for, as he explained

The length of the interview depends on when we reach this point. When the person feels relieved, we wrap things up. This means we talk until we get there. I make a point of that.

What it takes to enjoy a job

Because Iwata had such a focus on people’s happiness (more on that later) he obviously had some thoughts about how people can enjoy their work. Another obvious wisdom:

Work is tough, full of unpleasant tasks. Some degree of perseverance is essential. Still, I suspect that whether or not a job is fun for someone depends a great deal on the breadth of their idea of what they’re able to enjoy.

Depending on how you approach it, work can feel dull. But, if you’re able to find the fun in discovering new things, almost everything you do can become interesting. This realization can be a major turning point in enjoying your job.

I have seen both types of workers so many times. There are some who say “The job description said this, this is what I’m paid for, I don’t want to go outside it” and they will complain endlessly if you ask them to pitch in elsewhere.

Other people relish new challenges, and even things that seem like entirely new jobs.

I have a friend that I worked with as a SharePoint engineer. We were operational engineers early in our career — we kept the servers running, but we didn’t build very much new stuff. It was all maintenance or, if the helpdesk ran into an end-user problem they didn’t know how to address, they’d send it our way.

We started analyzing the tickets and noticed that most of the issues from the helpdesk weren’t things they didn’t have rights to, it was just stuff they didn’t know how to do. I think a common “engineer” response in this case would be to send a nasty email to their manager, telling them to get their team inline. But this friend decided that the best solution would be for us to go and train the helpdesk.

The helpdesk wasn’t in the same building — it was a forty minute drive but we started right away. Once a month we’d head to the other building, bring donuts, welcome in the helpdesk and train them on SharePoint. And the escalated tickets fell off a cliff, giving us more time to focus on engineering tasks.

It would be easy to say “I’m an engineer, my job is engineering, not training,” but having a wide “breadth” of work he was willing to enjoy helped my friend find a better solution. And we actually did have a lot of fun doing it. Plus, free donuts.

On respecting others

There will always be people who see things differently than you. Perhaps to an unreasonable degree. Still, these people surely have their own reasons, their own history and values. Moreover, they’re bound to be able to do things you can’t do, and know things you don’t know. This doesn’t mean accepting everything they suggest, but respecting that they have skills you lack, and are doing things that you can’t do yourself. Whether or not you can maintain this respect will vastly influence how much fun and fulfillment you get out of a job.
…
I’ve lived my life believing that people deserve respect.

Recognizing that people have “their own reasons, their own history and values” is an obvious wisdom that seems scarcer and scarcer by the day.

But I love the simple exclamation that “I’ve lived my life believing that people deserve respect.” His actions around layoffs are evidence of that. The fact that he spoke to every employee as long as necessary spoke to that. If you read the book and learn his reasoning behind how the Wii was designed, it speaks to that as well.

On reading books

Iwata was a voracious reader, and when he entered management he started reading management books, many of which he recommended to the people around him (I would love to find a list of the books he recommended, but it seems it was never collected). Obviously I connected to this, but what’s funny is why he read books. As Shigeru Miyamoto recalls:

Iwata didn’t read in search of hints on how to do things, but to find support for the ideas that constituted his worldview, and so that he could use books as a resource for conveying these ideas to others. He was always pondering the meaning of what Nintendo was doing, and the cicumstances in which the company found itself at any given time, so when he found something that validated what he was thinking in a book that he was reading, it strengthened his resolve. By recommending that employees read thse books, he was able to explain his ideas and unify the vision of the company. This is how he put these books to use.

This surprised me! The impression of Iwata I got through reading his writings is one of a humble person who is eager to learn from anyone at all times. And yet Miyamoto seems to be saying that he read primarily to confirm his own beliefs, and find ways of explaining them to others.

As I thought about it more I realized that my first impression of what Miyamoto said probably wasn’t accurate. Iwata spoke over and over about how important it was to not follow the crowd in business. To him, it was important that Nintendo retain a unique and different identity from other game companies. So he built a philosophy of what Nintendo should be, and, by extension, who he should be as President. And then, with this identity in mind, he looked to other sources to learn how to expand on and explain this identity and philosophy to others in the business. And, as Miyamoto said, when something confirmed the special identity he tried to maintain at Nintendo, it “strengthened his resolve.”

I think that’s something I should learn from Iwata. Starting with my first management position I’ve read books with an almost relentless hunger, desperately trying to find the best way to be a manager, the best way to lead a team, the best way to learn and grow myself.

But nobody agrees. There is no “right” way to be a manager or even a person, and by giving equal credence to everyone I end up pulled in hundreds of different directions. I respect people who take the time to share what they’ve learned by writing books, and feel that I’m showing gratitude when I read with an open mind.

But I will never find the right way, and maybe it’s better to create a personal philosophy, at least around how I manage, and then begin reading books to expand on that philosophy, instead of constantly building new ones.

But I think that’s a very hard balance to strike. I think Iwata did it better than most. But as I read the book I looked for things that confirmed management philosophies that were important to me, and one thing stood out.

Fostering Happiness

Near the end of the book a few close friends and coworkers of Iwata write sections about him (the quote from Miyamoto above is taken from this section). One of these friends is Shigesato Itoi, who got to know Iwata while working on the game “Earth Bound.”

Near the end of Itoi’s section, he says this about Iwata:

Iwata thoroughly enjoyed seeing people smile. This was behind his management philosophy for Nintendo. I think his life’s work was to foster happiness.

And he was the kind of guy who spared no effort to achieve that goal. He loved supporting people, loved to understand things, and loved the communication so essential to the process.

This so completely “supports the ideas that constitute my worldview.” I have always focused on the happiness and fulfillment of the people on my team, for two main reasons:

1. Happy, fulfilled people do better work.
2. What is the point of success if it leaves behind broken people?

So I try to thread the needle. I try to do more, and to help the people I work with, and the customers we serve, and the teams we support, come away happy.

I remember my first real management job, after I’d gotten to know the team a bit I thought it was important to talk about why we did what we did. Why our work mattered.

I managed an IT department at a theater, and we ran all the IT resources that the theaters used to schedule movies, to sell tickets, to sell food — basically everything except running the projectors and HVAC.

So we met in a converted storage room under one of the auditoriums and I told them that thousands of people come through the movie theaters every day, some of them on dates, some of them bringing kids or family, some of them on their own just looking for a distraction. And if our systems were functioning perfectly they could have a good time, they could get their tickets and their popcorn quickly and without fuss, and go to their seats, and their focus would be on the movie and not on how long it took to get their tickets because the kiosk kept rebooting. And those people might have good dates because of us.

And not just our customers, but the team members. If things worked well and the lines didn’t go out the door, full of increasingly frustrated customers, the team members would have a good day. They could come to work and focus on providing good experiences. They could smile and give someone their popcorn instead of apologizing because the system was down again. And they would go home having had a good day.

I distinctly remember telling them that no one had a greater influence on the happiness of everyone in that building except the general managers of the theaters themselves.

And I believed that we could provide that happiness by doing good work without people needing to be run ragged, without needing to cycle through helpdesk members as they burned out over and over again, without coming to dread hearing from customers or other team members. Our team could be happy. We could make our coworkers happy. We could help make customers happy. That was why we did what we did.

It felt a little idealistic, but I believed it. But I also felt like this philosophy limited me. I’m not a cutthroat executive, intent on squeezing maximum productivity from my team and maximum money from the customer. And I felt like eventually I’d reach a limit, where to succeed I would need to become that kind of executive, but I wouldn’t be capable of it and that would be it. The limits of my potential.

So reading about Satoru Iwata, a man who believed in respecting people and whose life work was to foster happiness, but also a man who led one of the most respected companies in the world — it supported my worldview. It strengthened my resolve. And I’m very grateful for that.