The knowledge and experience we gain throughout our lives are stored in the temporal lobe of the brain. The temporal lobe stores and accumulates various experiences. Meanwhile, the frontal lobe of the brain creates motivation, a sense of goal, and enthusiasm. This is that the advantages and disadvantages of young people and seniors come into play. As we get older, we gain more experience, so seniors have more creativity to draw from. However, older people often lose their motivation. Young people may have motivation, but they have little accumulated experience. If you want to increase your creativity, you just need to make sure that the circuit that connects motivation and experience is well connected. Anyone can improve their creativity by making an effort to increase their experience and motivation at any time.
So how can young people increase their knowledge and experience? In today’s world, the mainstream idea is that you should not go beyond the rules or change the rules. However, as you can see from Toyota’s signboard method, there are always improvements to be made in the process of daily work. In light of reality, if you feel something is “strange,” you may need to reconsider the rules themselves. If you feel something is difficult or hard to do, think about how you can make it easier. Don’t ignore the “difficulty” and see it as an opportunity to improve. In an environment that improvement is possible, there seems to be a tolerance of “the OK spirit” among both yourself and others. “It’s OK to fail.” It’s OK to try things you don’t know anything about. It’s OK to take your time. People who grow up in such an OK environment seem to grow up to be independent.
People want to gain experience and enrich the world. It seems that business opportunities lie not in doing something because it seems profitable, but in doing things that make people happy. Kubota’s Asahi Shuzo has come up with a 1% strategy. It seems to have been successful by creating a system in which it is “good” if 1 out of 100 people become a customer. It’s difficult to sell to everyone, so they have come up with a strategy of not trying to sell to everyone. If mass production and mass consumption are pursued, the power to determine prices will be held by major retailers. If you are proud of the quality of your products, it is ideal to decide the selling price yourself. Companies that pursue the ideal have mechanisms to make people happy, gain social recognition, and increase profits. It seems that in the future, methods will be required to understand consumer demands, respond to those demands with flexible ideas, and pursue profits with flexible corporate strategies. We want to use the living knowledge we have to make people happy.
