Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's Legendary CEO

by Satoru Iwata

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.

Tremendous idea. I need to work on that.

if a person hasn’t given you an opportunity, it’s up to you to make one and approach them.

the whole point of a company was for people to work together toward a common goal by combining their strengths, I should clarify our goal.

“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.”

management depends on an ability to minimize your personal agenda.

Discovering a shared set of values makes both parties feel a lot more comfortable.

I always made an effort, whether it was with our customers or with the other companies that gave us work, to deliver a product that exceeded their expectations.

“What are this company’s strengths?” the answer was clear: leveraging development was our sole hope of turning things around. This took me all of ten seconds to realize.

To paraphrase, sometimes the work will be extremely difficult, while other times it’s not so bad. Work always involves some level of difficulty. Otherwise, we wouldn’t call it work.

the whole point of a company is for regular people, each with their distinctive characteristics, to join forces and accomplish giant tasks they could not undertake alone.

Nothing ever starts out perfect. It’s all about repeated trial and error. You try out different things and realize, “Oh, that’s better, let’s do that,” gradually improving the overall design.

Meanwhile, if you want to make any big picture changes, the first thing you need to do is find the bottlenecks and fix them.

Before taking any action, you should identify the most problematic areas and figure out what you, and only you, can do to fix them.