Ask Iwata
Satoru Iwata, edited by Hobonichi
“A good idea solves multiple problems in a flash” - Shigeru Miyamoto
What I like
Iwata is one of those rare emblems in business leadership that everyone talks about as being a genuinely good person
His writings disambiguate themes like talent and genius that are thrown around often without meaning
Iwata’s philosophies on managing people resonate with me as someone who believes in humane leadership
What’s missing
Not much, I just wish there was more content / it was a longer book
I would have liked to learn more about his specific day-to-day activities as the CEO of Nintendo
Key Topics
Leadership, Videogames, Humane, Talent
Review
Ask Iwata is a written history of the life and legacy of Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s legendary CEO over a span of 10 years. This book goes into his humble beginnings as a programmer who happened to make some of the first impactful videogames. As someone who is interested in video games and management / leadership, this was a great book to pick up for me as I genuinely appreciate Iwata’s leadership style and hope to be able to use it in my own ways of working.
Each major section of the book goes through stages of Iwata’s life, from how he grew up, started his career in gaming, found Nintendo, became the CEO, and tragically passed away. There are lessons in each of the chapters. What this book does well, which I like from other books, is at the end of each chapter it includes a bulleted list of core learnings from Iwata.
At his core, Iwata was a humane leader. He cared about the people he worked for and worked for him. It was his style to try and understand his employees on a personal level, and spent ample time doing so. The connections that he made along the way on his journey helped paint him as someone who truly valued connections with people. He was also an excellent problem-solver, and worked directly with people to overcome obsticles. Moreover, his goal as a businessman was to make people happy. That was his biggest goals. Fortunately that is something easy to do in videogames, and I think that’s why himself and the industry were a perfect pair.
Learnings
A single breakthrough that makes multiple things better is a good idea. Solving one problem at a time is no way to compete, as other companies solve problems in those ways.
Analyzing problems is about breaking things down into discrete elements, while generating hypotheses for how to do things so that everything comes together. When programmers find a problem, they come up with a handful of hypotheses and weigh their merits, in a process that repeats daily.
Talent basically involves the ability to find rewards. It isn’t so much about results themselves as it is deriving pleasure from the results you’ve achieved. A virtuous cycle is created when the rewards outweigh our efforts. Once these cycles get going our skillset expands. One cycle leads to another. Unless we can uncover these connections, our skill set will never grow.
If your primary motivation is to make those above you think you’re clever, they’re going to see through you. At the end of the day what companies want from hires are those who can admit they don’t know everything.
Satoru Iwata was known by the people he worked with and at home as someone who loved to make other people happy. He was also an excellent problem-solver.