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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Satoru Iwata
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October 5 - November 14, 2024
As human beings, unless we have someone to compliment our work and enjoy what we’ve created, we’re not apt to go out on a limb.
My college coursework helped me understand the basics of computing. I’m glad I went, but most of the work that I did later on was a continuation of the things I’d taught myself.
Making games for the Famicom was loads of fun, especially when they started selling like crazy all around the world. Since those games were designed on commission, we didn’t benefit financially from the sales, but we were overjoyed that our games had become household names. These creations that, once upon a time, had only been known to the friend seated next to me had reached people all over the world. What could be cooler than that?
Looking back, the games that we developed in those days all involved big software ideas where the client wasn’t quite sure how to pull it off. Once we had made something of a name for ourselves, we were lauded for our technical abilities, which led to a steady stream of work.
HAL Laboratory ran into financial difficulties. Then, when I was thirty-three, I was promoted to president, but since the company was on shaky ground this was no time for celebration. Simply put, I became president because we had no other option.
This is why I spent my first month as president interviewing everybody at the company. The discoveries were endless. My plan was to be a sounding board and to get a sense of what was happening, but when I sat down with each person individually, I was blown away by how much I was learning.
It was
during these interviews that I realized that decision-making means gathering and analyzing information and managing priorities, and that as you discover your priorities, you should see where they take you as you work through your decisions.
Ask me what sort of company I would want
to work for, and I would say “A place where my boss understands me” or “A place where my boss cares about my quality of life.”
The only constant from one interview to the next was my opening question: “Are you happy doing what you’re doing?”
“The mission of HAL Laboratory is to bring happiness to our customers—who play the games—and to our employees—who make them—through our products.”
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. If you interrupt them midsentence and say, “It’s more like this,” it’s only natural for them to think, “This person has absolutely no clue what I’m saying.” If you let people tell you what they want to say, and wait for them to finish, they’ll give you a chance to weigh in afterward.
This is why I think that management depends on an ability to minimize your personal agenda.
The number of things we should be doing is always greater than what we can actually do. If you try doing everything on your list, you’ll only wear yourself out. Which is why an awareness of a group’s collective strengths will help you clarify priorities. I think setting things in place is what management is all about.
At work, it may feel like everyone is making a consistent effort, but sometimes the client will surprise you and be more excited or less excited than anticipated—even if the amount of time and energy you’ve all invested was the same as usual. You can give two jobs 100 percent, but one client will see it as 100 percent, and another will see it as 500 percent. To paraphrase, sometimes the work will be extremely difficult, while other times it’s not so bad. Work always involves some level of difficulty.
When the going gets tough, if we’re not praised accordingly for our efforts, it makes things even harder. When things enter a downward spiral, people’s spirits flag all around, and speaking with staff becomes essential. Conversely, when the company is praised out of proportion for its efforts, it starts to feel like everyone can breathe more easily and relax.
when the whole group can earn praise without working insanely hard, things get better and better on their own, creating a virtuous cycle where the work only gets stronger. This means the group has tapped into their strengths. When this ...
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If we want to propagate the species, each of us needs to make a point of why we do this one thing better than anybody else. In other words, an ability to assert “I am better at this skill than other people” is in the DNA all around us. Those without that kind of strength have gradually disappeared from the gene pool.
Hence, all living things have an innate ability to assert their unique abilities.
And so, in essence, a company can aspire to be a group focused on the things that it does best, but in order for people to work together it’s imperative to figure out the bare minimum of operating tasks that need to be completed, regardless of how taxing or unpleasant they may be.
when large numbers of people have a hand in the same project, some tasks are divided easily and some are not. Even complex atmospheric simulations can be achieved at greater speed when they’re divided into various parts and concurrently programmed for separate processors. But sometimes one task will influence the operation of another, and that task will wind up influencing the first, making it impossible to work concurrently.
Any job will wind up having bottlenecks, these areas with little wiggle room that limit the overall scope of the project. Meanwhile, if you want to make any big picture changes, the first thing you need to do is find the bottlenecks and fix them. You can fix as many of the looser areas as you like, but the general design will barely change. This is something I have come to understand on a deep level. It’s one of the reasons I was so comfortable working with computers.
In programs, it’s possible for a given process to be executed so repeatedly that it would be fair to say that 1 percent of the entire program eats up 70 to 80 percent of the total processing time. As a result, until you’ve cleared up all the bottlenecks, it’s meaningless to try to speed up any other parts.
Before taking any action, you should identify the most problematic areas and figure out what you, and only you, can do to fix them.
Ideally, you’d start off saying, “Okay, this has to be a bottleneck, so if I change this then the whole thing will improve,” and then proceed accordingly, but more often than not, this isn’t possible.
The needs of customers change, as does the climate of the market, the ways we share information, the content people want to see, the people buying the games, and the kinds of stores that sell them. Everything is always changing, is always in a state of flux. And yet, I don’t believe successful organizations need to fix what isn’t broken. Their employees have been working all along with the best intentions and have achieved success in the process, so rejecting the status quo will not encourage sympathy or understanding. Every kind of change involves rejection of the status quo, but such
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When we test out the things we make, people have no interest whatsoever, not even a little bit. This is how it always is, in the beginning. From there, unless we can win people over, improving products so much that people pick them up and smile, we’ve failed. It’s not enough to make a big splash and move units. Unless you can come up with something new six months or one year down the line and make customers say, “Wow, before I knew it I was playing all the time,” you’re done. If you fail in that respect, you haven’t actually accomplished your objective.
We made it absolutely clear that our mission was to “shock people, in a good way.” Unless you can shock people, you’ll never gain new customers. Since shocking people involves undermining what the customer expects, it requires determination. Take the Nintendo DS. At first, lots of people were confused. When we announced, “We’re going to release a console that has two screens and a touch panel,” most people must have thought, “Nintendo has gone off the deep end!” In our eyes, staying the course meant that we had no future, but the average person probably thought it was a crazy
idea.
In my
experience, there are two types of interviewers: those who make a person feel at ease in order to get a sense of who they really are and judge their candidacy accordingly, and those who believe an unrelaxed person, though unable to speak their mind, will reveal all kinds of things about themselves, like how sociable or strong they are.
I’m the firs...
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I like to ask: “Out of all the work you’ve done so far, what was the most interesting thing? And what was the most painful?”
the end of the day, what the company wants most from its new hires is someone who is happy to admit they don’t know everything. But at the same time, they don’t want you to ask your coworkers the same questions over and over. New hires always seem to be divided between those who welcome criticism and those who don’t—those people whose actions you can safely criticize and those you have to call out with the utmost care.
To put it simply, whenever possible, I want to assign work to those who actually want to do it. It’s only natural. Who wants to ask someone to do something important if they don’t seem to care? 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
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So how do you know when a project is going well? When someone points to a gray area in the initial plan, then asks you “Hey, can I take care of this?” and follows through. Projects where this keeps on happening tend to end up going well. On the other hand, when this phenomenon fails to occur, you might finish up all right, but things will feel a bit dysfunctional, which is never a good sign.
When people work together at a company, they allow their coworkers to take care of everything outside of their own responsibilities, letting go and bracing themselves for the results. As this arrangement increases in scale, it develops levels, broadening in scope. This is what we call a company. When working this way, forging connections as we strive to achieve our objectives, respecting others—especially people who have different values and beliefs—becomes incredibly important.
What really firmed up this perspective was something Shigesato Itoi taught me in my early thirties. Itoi is over ten years older than me, but when I saw how much respect he showed toward people who could do things he didn’t understand, I thought, “This guy is cool. I want to be like that.” Most importantly, though, I realized, “He’s not doing anything exceptional, just showing honest admiration for people who can do things he can’t do.” I’m not simply being moralistic. Treating the people you meet on the job with respect makes your own work more fulfilling. That’s all I’m trying to say.
On a side note, years ago, when I was a whole lot younger and felt a crazy sense of urgency, I used to tell myself, “I wish that I could clone myself three times over.” Looking back, however, I recognize this thought was arrogant and narrow-minded. Our differences are what make each of us so valuable and give life meaning. I’m embarrassed that I ever thought this way.
Creativity, after all, is an expression of the ego.
Even when I’m vaguely aware of how tough it’s going to be, my baseline assumption is, “We’ll work it out.” A leader has no other choice. The
When we made the Wii, I told my staff, “I want the console to be no thicker than three DVD cases.” Knowing very well how difficult this would be, I pretended it was no big deal, though it must have been a challenge. Still, this only works in moderation; sometimes you push the envelope, sometimes you don’t. There needs to be a balance.
The one thing I can say with confidence, though, is that, as a company, Nintendo works incredibly hard to make good fortune come our way. Then again, the world is full of cases where people tried just as hard but luck wasn’t on their side and things didn’t work out.
I’m driven to understand why things happen. I can’t be satisfied otherwise. Inside of me, a voice is always asking questions: Why do things like this happen? What makes this person talk and act the way they do? How did the world wind up this way? I’m always searching for the reasons why things are the way they are.
when both parties communicate effectively, it’s safe to assume that one party has made a skillful compromise, allowing them to understand and sympathize with the other person.
At first, we give them all our energy. That could mean time, labor, or money. Once we’ve done our best, we have a response to what we’ve done, and whatever feeling we experience is our reward. When the reward feels like it’s greater than the energy and effort we’ve expended, we don’t give up. But when the result of all our efforts is a disappointment, we tend to fail. I think these conditions are essential to making games that people want to play, and this same logic helps to explain what makes or breaks a person’s mission to learn English or the like.
Watching the world, they’ll try to create and release things that they find personally interesting. When other people like the things they’ve made, they get a boost of energy, and they do an even better job. The ability to establish such a cycle is what we might refer to, in these cases, as their talent. Talent basically involves the ability to find rewards.
The instant we begin to feel that the rewards outweigh our efforts, a virtuous cycle starts up and keeps on going. It
seems to me that whenever we can tell ourselves, “I think I’m good at this,” the cycle of reward is in full swing. Once we have one of these cycles going, our skill set begins to expand. One cycle of reward directs us to another, giving us a model for enjoying the rewards of new and different activities.
