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Tokyo’s internet Jesus uses secret creed to command CEOs
- newbie578 6y agoReading this article, I feel like I read a satire? 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..
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mudlus 6y agoThe better comparison was the zaibatsu (which was actually legitimized by the emperor [a Shinto God] at the time)
- christiansakai 6y agowhich probably will have backlash by the Japanese society. Also if he compares it to other <insert other religion prophet/god here>, also get backlash. It is better for him to compare himself to Jesus.
- PinkMilkshake 6y agoI wouldn't mind hearing from a Japanese person if comparing yourself to jesus has the same creepy vibe as it does in the west. It may not.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- noizejoy 6y agoto be fair, it took a couple of millennia to get to the current numbers ...
- jacquesm 6y agoGood CLTV though, and cheap on marketing. They're doing ok. If they were a company I'd buy stock in them ;)
- anonymfus 6y agoWhat are Jesus' numbers? I found Vatican's financial report, it seems to be a significantly smaller economy than that conglomerate: http://www.ior.va/content/dam/ior/documenti/rapporto-annuale/ANNUAL-REPORT-2019_FINALE_en_min.pdf http://www.ior.va/content/dam/ior/documenti/rapporto-annuale...
- lainga 6y agoJesus has significant but un-exercised IP rights on a lot of technologies underpinning the modern economy (e.g., all the waters under heaven, dry land, every living creature that moveth, etc.)
- RhodoYolo 6y agoThis^ Most under-rated comment ever. Plus, maybe if you counted all the skisms (Mormonism, Protestant, etc.) i'm sure it'd outrank GMO.
- robertlagrant 6y agoDon't forget the ur-patent: There is nothing new under the sun.
- tempodox 6y agoAnd his father's Universal Replicator: creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). It has to be a heavily guarded secret, otherwise it would ruin physics as we know it.
- omginternets 6y agoThe Vatican isn't Jesus, either. Your comment completely misses the mark.
- Alekhine 6y agoNo, but according to doctrine, the Church is his bride, so it ought to be under a joint account at least.
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- TulliusCicero 6y agoI think comparing yourself to Jesus probably has a different connotation in a Japanese context.
- fomine3 6y agoIn Japanese context: Normally no one comparing to Jesus.
- TulliusCicero 6y agoEh, I dunno. Jesus isn't exactly unknown to the Japanese, even if Christianity itself isn't a very common religion there. It's sort of like Buddha in the West.
- ponker 6y agoValley is full of bro’s talking about how they are the Jobs and the nerd they found is the Wozniak. Why not go up to an even more successful founder?
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThe comparison was meant to emphasize that the organization views his creed as gospel, and all his executives practice what he preaches. He wasn't saying he had the scope or influence of Jesus.
- whym 6y agoI wonder if the Zoom interview was conducted in his native language. If not, he might have been trying to say "I learn from how Jesus founded Christianity and apply that to how I operate my company," which is a bit strange thing to say but not as creepy as "I'm Jesus." It looks like Kumagai is (at least previously he said he was) a Christian. https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/29818?page=3 https://toyokeizai.net/articles/-/29818?page=3
- ekianjo 6y agoif it was in Japanese, he probably referred to himself as "kami-sama" rather than Jesus Christ, in which case it could be interpreted as your <god of reference> depending on your own religion. 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.
- howlgarnish 6y agoTBH that would be even more weird. Customers are kami-sama, never yourself. 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.)
- jldugger 6y agoHe did have 12 disciples tho.
- ekianjo 6y agoA disciple can be a random follower. Priest is something different altogether.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Jesus never had priests working under him. 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.
- ekianjo 6y ago> GMO is a conglomerate for the internet era, dominating large parts of Japan’s web infrastructure 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.
- lima 6y agoWhat's wrong with NTT? Always found them to be a reliable, and they've been the main driver of innovation in dragging the ISP industry towards modern standards.
- jchb 6y agoSecond that, what's wrong with NTT? 250mbit fiber for a fraction of what it would cost in the US. IPv6 ready. Basically no down time in 5 years. Very polite service staff. 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.
- ev1 6y agoNTT the carrier and NTT Docomo (the horrid mobile phone provider that I was forced to use on a trip there) are different, probably.
- numpad0 6y agoI don’t think they are any worse than any comparable regional largest telcos in the world ... better than SoftBank at least.
- presentation 6y agoLooks like Japan's telco sector is going through a US T-Mobile moment, with Rakuten Mobile trying to drive the prices down with a free year of service and a cheap prepaid unlimited data plan, chock full with change and hope rhetoric. They even use practically the same color as T-Mobile!
- smoothierev 6y agoFrom the Bloomberg article: "Some of the doctrine is made up of Silicon Valley-esque platitudes (“Change begins with the mind”) and clichés (“Make everything absolutely cool and beautiful!”). Some is idiosyncratic: Multiple-choice surveys of potential clients must always have an even number of answer options" Anyone know what the even number of answer options is about? Is it to force no neutral answers? Is it a numerology thing?
- 542458 6y agoI was also wondering about that! “No neutral answers” is an interesting theory, although I’ve used 1-5 preference plus “no opinion” (for an even total of six) before. 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.
- setr 6y agoIsn't 3 already basically no opinion
- Nullabillity 6y agoThere's a difference between "meh, I don't care" and "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
- archgoon 6y ago> 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.
- howlgarnish 6y agoIt's pretty standard when you want to force people to express an opinion. For example, I know a company where the interview ratings sheet does not have a "neutral" choice, you need to either support or oppose the hire and can then calibrate how strongly you feel either way.
- pnathan 6y agohttps://www.kumagai.com/?pid=6888 https://www.kumagai.com/?pid=6888 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.
- vagrantJin 6y agoYeah...the "lol" thing is off-putting though. Makes it feel like I'm reading an 11 year olds diary.
- lovemenot 6y agoThe point of these religion and cult references is to try to answer the existential question that the market asks of any conglomerate. 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.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoAnalogy fails, it’s internet Pope not internet Jesus
- hexbinencoded 6y agoIt seems purposeful that more internet startups have innuendo in their names. (GroupOn competitor)
- fomine3 6y ago"Tokyo' Internet Jesus" for calling GMO's CEO is really funny. IMO no one (except employee?) think he's Jesus. GMO is known for bad acts (most acts are previous but still does some) for engineers. Onamae.com is known as worst domain registrar for many reasons for a long time (maybe similar to GoDaddy).
- hardwaresofton 6y agoCompany aside, in a weird coincidence I recently came across an interesting slide deck from a meetup (?) here: https://speakerdeck.com/takutakahashi/ceph-on-zfs 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. [0]: https://github.com/openebs/zfs-localpv/ https://github.com/openebs/zfs-localpv/ [1]: https://github.com/rook/ https://github.com/rook/
- square_usual 6y agoThe whole "secret creed" angle in the headline is pure sensationalism. Half the article doesn't even talk about it, and even the way they describe it sounds like a normal "business values" kind of deal, maybe expressed in a weird way. You wouldn't call Bezos' leadership principles a "creed" for Amazon's management, would you?
- kstenerud 6y agoThis doesn't really look much different from how Japan has always operated: 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.
- classified 6y agoOne especially sinister way of looking at this is to compare it with The Grail in Garth Ennis's Preacher comics. They control and command not only CEOs but Presidents, Prime Ministers, and organized crime, all over the world, but clandestinely. If you like satire with a touch of the supernatural, check it out (not for the faint of heart): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(comics)
- bobthechef 6y agoIs this any different in character from the messianic CEOs of Silicon Valley?