Tokyo’s internet Jesus uses secret creed to command CEOs
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
1. Have a set of trusted high level people and reward loyalty above all else.
2. Have an army of collective, group-minded people who will buy into and follow your creed. (From the article: “We only have people in the group who share our vision. But if you don’t share the vision, please go somewhere else.”, which is similar to The Sony Way and Toyota's approach in the 70s, all the way back to the daimyo in the middle ages).
3. Give your army the feeling that you'll take care of them for life.
4. Find out what the competition is doing and copy them, only better. (From the article: For example, rivals must be monitored daily, and when one differentiates itself in the market, a GMO company must match it within a day or two).
5. Have mantras, rituals, etc to keep an air of mysticism to the leadership and their cause.
This has been Japan's MO since medieval times, and it works in Japan because that's part of the personality of their country. Every other country has its own personality, and thus its own optimal way of doing things. Sometimes it gives them an international edge, sometimes it doesn't.
It looks like Kumagai is (at least previously he said he was) a Christian. https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/29818?page=3
EDIT: if he actually referred to himself as being "Jesus Christ" it would make absolutely no sense, since Jesus never had priests working under him.
I think we're reading a bit too much into this: he was riffing off the "GMO-ism is a religion" theme and went a bit far with the metaphor, but Jesus is meant here as a "leader of religion", not literally God because trinity and all that. (Japan not being a Christian nation, the average Japanese knows next to nothing about Christianity.)
In the traditional Christian understanding on which the concept of apostolic succession is grounded he did, because the the apostles are ur-bishops and bishops are priests.
Huh? He had apostles/disiples, and he explicitly prepared them and send them to found churches all over the world...
Japan talking about Christians isn't particularly different. Christianity and comparisons to it are made relatively casually, with much less cultural weight than they would have in the US or Europe. Here's a Japanese rap song [1] whose lyrics [2] go, "As the Bible is to a devout Christian, so to me is is the Zulu Nation" (translation [2]).
So in my opinion the "internet Jesus uses secret creed" thing is at least mildly clickbaity. It'd be the equivalent of seizing upon the name "Zen of Python" to write an article about "A Language with a simplicity driven by Buddhism".
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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnJMBcQFNME#t=2m51s
[2] https://genius.com/Genius-english-translations-aklo-rgto-eng...
Just to prove your point - crucified Santa Claus [0]
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-21/how-the-iconography-o...
Non-native English readers see everywhere terms like "product evangelist", so that's not a leap at all to call a very good evangelist "a Jesus".
"You know the office? I'm basically Michael Scott." "To these people, I am Steve Jobs."
Christianity has a particular bug about calling oneself "Jesus", as in, "the second coming of Christ" and goes on high alert over it. That's what I got out of it, at least.
Japan's web infrastructure is also where NTT, KDDI and Rakuten play in Japan. All of them are horrible companies, if anyone looks at how their services work and operate. The West can rest easy, Japan's online giants represent no threat to anyone.
Sure, if you look at how they design their websites, signup process and router UX, it's... a bit special (from a "western" perspective) ... But it works.
I mean, they brought customer installable java apps way earlier to the game, and it was miles ahead of the crap J2ME that stack of western phones. They brought imode when other countries where toying with wap. Then NFC based electronic payment years before anyone else, GPS apps etc.
I worked with one of their phone QA team for a while, and they were unsurprisingly pragmatic, very clever on the trade-offs and cared a lot more about what you had to say than if you came with a white shirt.
As much as NTT can be a very old and dusty company, NTT Docomo was at least for a very long time a very dynamic and forward thinking company.
No idea what the rest of the company is like, but innovation is somewaht hard to come by in Japan, so it's reasonable to expect most companies to not really be pushing the envelope. Ironically, NTT contributing to a no-bullshit rock-solid open source tool like Postgres is par for the course -- it's great that they're pushing innovations inside Postgres, but technically from an outside lens it's a conservative place to invest.
Anyone know what the even number of answer options is about? Is it to force no neutral answers? Is it a numerology thing?
An alternative theory might be just that this simply forces people to pay attention when building surveys - nothing magic about even or odd, just forcing that final check-over to make sure everything adds up.
Ah; so a no brown M&M's rule.
https://speakerdeck.com/takutakahashi/ceph-on-zfs
I was impressed when I found this slide deck and it was in japanese, and from a thoroughly japanese company here. If you don't happen to know japanese, just go like... 3 slides in and you can see the creator is from GMO, also there are some images.
If you're not into infra you might as well stop reading here, but basically the idea is to get durable crash-resistant replicated storage on kubernetes by actually combining two CSI storage providers:
- Run ZFS as your on-disk file system (for absolute durability without bitrot and some of the other benefits) for each node
- Add the openebs/zfs-localpv[0] to dynamically provision zvols with say xfs or ext4 to make drives for ceph to consume
- Add Ceph via Rook[1] to get synchronous remote replication on every write (if you want it), and give ceph the drives you made (the zvol(s))
- Expose storage to your kubernetes cluster that is replicated (depending on how you set up ceph) and easy to back up and/or duplicate at the node level (w/ zfs send). You can back up at multiple levels, nodes themselves (with some replication lag since zfs doesn't so sync replication) and the workloads that run on them (which are sync replicated across the network).
There is some overlap in these tools -- ceph's relatively new bluestore engine does checksumming now and self-heals, so there's not so much reason to use ZFS at the lowest level at all, but ZFS does have some features that ceph doesn't, and is somewhat easier to manage with less moving parts in user space.
Apparently this is his home page. What a fascinating website and approach. It looks very hand rolled. The discipline he recounts aligns with many other very successful people as well.
How are you better together than broken up?
Given the huge negative valuation of the parent against the sum of the children, I can imagine how much pressure Kumagai must have to exert to counter the market's disintegrative forces.
I mean come on, comparing your executives to priests and yourself to Jesus has to be on the high end of arrogancy?
Especially when your company is not THAT kind of a big deal. If we convert the yen to usd, his "conglomerate" which is almost 30 years old had revenues of $2 billion dollars?
Don't get me wrong, it is a lot of money, but if you are going to compare yourself to Jesus then better start pumping those numbers..
http://www.ior.va/content/dam/ior/documenti/rapporto-annuale...
Plus, maybe if you counted all the skisms (Mormonism, Protestant, etc.) i'm sure it'd outrank GMO.
As long as the global average per acre is $500 or more, they've got at least a trillion in wealth. Unlike the corporation, the Church is more decentralized and structured such that most of the revenue moving through that property (donations, tithes, salaries, maintenance, etc.) doesn't show up on the books.
[1] https://archive.curbed.com/2017/10/18/16483194/catholic-chur...
Unlike a regular business or charity, a church is expected to exist in perpetuity so long as there are people in the area.
“ In 2010, the Vatican had an income of $326 million and ran a $13 million budget surplus, but in 2011 the Vatican ran a $19 million deficit. And while some of that money obviously went to maintaining church buildings and art, much of it also went to charitable causes.
Recent re-evaluations of Vatican assets show that the Vatican has approximately $1 billion in total assets. For comparison, Harvard University’s endowment is over $30 billion. So, relatively speaking, the Catholic Church is not really wealthy, and no one blames museums for maintaining their art work and structures. “
The calculation above is like adding up all the wealth of people with the last name Smith.