[Reading Record -65] Team X
A true account of how a company broke out of a 'vicious cycle' it had fallen into
The author of this book, Katsuhisa Kinoshita, is the Representative Director and President of Kitano Tatsujin Corporation, who grew the company into a high-profit enterprise listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market using his unique web marketing methods.
Kitano Tatsujin Corporation reached its peak in 2019, but gradually began to decline, with its main customer acquisition dropping to 1/6th by 2021. This book contains, without omission, the know-how the author used as a manager to 'transform' his team, break the vicious cycle, and restore business performance 13-fold in one year.
Team X: The secret to creating a 'self-running organization' by eliminating reliance on specific individuals
In this book, the following '5 Corporate Organizational Diseases (Challenges)' and '5 X-Points (Solutions)' are presented as the necessary mindset for business success. I felt they were very much on target.
[5 Corporate Organizational Diseases (Challenges)]
1. Misconception of Job Definition
→ Misinterpreting the purpose of an assigned task not as 'achieving the goal' but as 'doing the task itself.'
2. Role Model Dependency
→ Becoming unable to work without a 'role model' to provide the correct answer.
3. Job Narrowing Phenomenon
→ People who join after a company's stable (or stagnant) period perceive their job scope too narrowly.
4. Numerical Omnipotence Syndrome
→ Treating numbers as if they are an omnipotent (while numbers are competent, they are not omnipotent) criterion for judgment.
5. Format Over-reliance Syndrome
→ Over-relying on a single success experience as a golden rule.
[5 X-Points (Solutions)]
1. KPI
→ Running PDCA cycles by setting KPIs and arriving at the correct KPIs (wrong KPIs accelerate vicious cycles). Then, making those KPIs easy to visualize.
2. Education Mechanism
→ Having two or more top players in the organization, where one raises performance and the other takes on the role of training new hires. And building an 'in-house original' education program.
3. Common Language
→ Using terms that are flooding the streets leads to individual interpretations. By intentionally creating an original common language, you turn internal tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.
4. Task Management
→ Proceeding with strategy formulation and task management as a set, based on the premise that 'members will naturally miss tasks' and 'it is difficult for others to execute what someone else has planned without omissions.'
5. Culture
→ The person who has the greatest influence on corporate culture is the 'leader.' Therefore, you must choose a leader after considering 'what kind of influence that person will have on those around them if they become a leader.' And the manager themselves must become a 'good leader.'
What is true leadership
True leadership is designing a state where results are produced even without the leader present. It is not about the leader's 'charisma,' but about creating a 'mechanism' where anyone can achieve the same results (= raising the resolution of every member's thinking).
There is likely no other methodology to functionally scale an organization.
Reference Links
・Amazon 'Team X' Book Introduction Page
・Kitano Tatsujin Corporation Official Website
・Katsuhisa Kinoshita Official Website