Episode 58 The Reality of Challenge and Failure: A Sense of Accomplishment Comes After Taking on the Challenge

“Real Management | The Successes and Failures of Running a Company, Told Candidly by Unscripted CEOs”

In this program, I, Hossy—also known as Hoshikawa Tetsushi—talk candidly about management and what goes on behind the scenes, based on my own experiences.

Real Management isreleased every Friday morning at 6:00 a.m..

Good morning. I’m Hossy, also known as Hoshikawa Tetsushi, the free spirit.

Last time,we talked about something we had never released to the public,“weara AIR,”a product by that name.

Exactly. We talked about a product that had been in development internally but ultimately ended without ever being released. And after covering the brand story starting from Simplism and all the various things we’ve done, we’ve more or less finished telling that story.

At the end, we talked about failures—Jawbone was one, Quirky was another, and my weara was one too. But paired with failure, there is always “challenge,” right? So this time, rather than just talking about my own past examples,“Challenge and Failure”is the theme I’d like to discuss.

This time, I’ll touch a little on my past as well, but it’s not really a discussion about what happened in the past. I think Gajiro will also bring in general perspectives and his own thoughts, so I expect the conversation will get pretty lively.

I think I’ve talked about this before, but first, when it comes to failure, I believe there are two kinds of failure.

Failure that comes from taking on a challenge, and failure that comes from not thinking at all.

There are those two types. A failure that doesn’t lead to the next step is truly meaningless, but a failure that does lead forward—a failure that comes after taking on a challenge—is meaningful, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing at all.

So I thought I’d start the discussion from around there.

I think there are plenty of cases where people fail without thinking things through. Those failures really don’t lead to anything, and I think they’re meaningless. So when we talk about failure, the thing that needs to be paired with it first is challenge.

I think people who have been listening to Real Management up to now will understand this, but my major failure was definitely weara. But I wanted to create something that didn’t exist in the world. I never thought it would be easy, and in fact, I decided to do it precisely because it wasn’t easy. I think that falls into the category of a challenge.

The failure there has led to what comes next, including understanding why it failed, and I learned many things from it. So I think that failure had meaning.

The first thing is something I often tell people around me—it’s a quote attributed to Einstein. Well, I’m not sure whether he actually said it directly, but there’s a well-known saying:“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”That’s the one.

If you live safely, you may not fail. For example, whether in manufacturing or services, if you try to do something simple—if you try to achieve something without taking on a challenge—then it’s something anyone can do.

For example, as we discussed when talking about mobile phones, if you simply take something made by a Chinese manufacturer, slightly change the memory specs, add a logo, or change the color, I don’t think that counts as “manufacturing.” You can’t differentiate yourself that way.

If I were to sell that and people realized, “Oh, this sells,” then someone else could sell the same thing in a different color with a different logo.

So in that case, there’s no real meaning in me being the one to release it. That just reminded me of something: in the past, there was a mobile phone manufacturer run by a female president that offered products in a wide variety of colors. But in reality, they were basically products normally sold in China with the labels replaced.

Even so, there was a time when they sold them while passionately talking about “manufacturing” as a manufacturer.

Personally, I felt that maybe that couldn’t really be called “manufacturing.”

That’s what I think. In the end, unless it’s something where you think, “This might fail,” it doesn’t really become a challenge. I don’t think doing something that is guaranteed to be achievable can be called a challenge.

After all, it ends up being, “Someone other than you could do this too.” Especially from now on, we live in an age overflowing with information, and know-how is being disclosed everywhere. AI is learning from all of that too. We’re entering an era where AI can truly handle simple things and things anyone can do.

That’s exactly why it’s important to challenge ourselves with things that don’t yet exist in the world, or things that make us think, “This is difficult.” I do think weara was a failure, but I don’t feel even the slightest bit that I shouldn’t have done it.

Including all the struggles and the reflections like, “I should have done this,” or “It would have been better if it had been more like that,” I learned a lot from it. It did fail, but the act of taking on the challenge itself was very enjoyable.

In the case of weara, many customers placed reservations, and although we ultimately refunded them, I think there was also a sense that people resonated with something I personally believed was good.

That’s right.

No, there wasn’t really anything like that.

Yes. Simplism was truly the first brand we launched. As I mentioned in the early episodes, it started as an imported brand, and from there we moved forward by creating products tailored to the Japanese market. So the failures of other brands didn’t really influence Simplism.

Even within Simplism, of course, the scale and methods changed from the early days to later on. As I mentioned before, when we transferred manufacturing from Taiwan to China, we changed various ways of doing things, so there are certainly areas where we gradually learned as we went. Though that’s a very small-scale example.

In the past, there was a time when we sold powered products under Simplism—chargers, specifically. We were making them in forms that didn’t exist in the market, but we lacked both the technical ability to properly inspect the internals and the awareness needed to take proper care of that side.

On the surface, they looked like proper chargers, and if you tested them, they worked. But each time the production lot changed, parts were changed without notice, costs were reduced on their own, and as a result, there was once a case that led to a fire. Even with that background, I’d say this case involved far too little consideration to simply dismiss it as “a failure that came from taking on a challenge.”

Since it was a charger, we should have understood and controlled the internal circuitry much more ourselves, but at the time, that idea never occurred to us at all. We sold it with the feeling of, “It’s done. It charges, and nothing like this exists in the world yet, so this is fine.” At that time, I learned that when you order the same product a second or third time, sometimes what gets shipped has different internals.

Well, in terms of challenge, there was also the fact that we had made an original charger at that time. In a strange way, precisely because we made something original, some parts became quality issues. In China, they want to mass-produce and sell in large quantities, right? The reference products they make themselves are designed with structures that are easy to manufacture.

And including parts procurement, they make them only with components that can be supplied stably. That’s why the cost is low. But when we try to include an original structure or original functions, we end up asking them to make something outside of that framework.

When that happens, they haven’t been making that product continuously, so they don’t have the know-how, and procuring parts and designing it are things they have to do for the first time. Then they might say, “Wait, we can’t get this part right away for the next lot,” and go, “Then maybe we’ll use this instead,” and end up using a different part. That really does happen.

So making something original does involve a certain amount of risk like that. But at the time, we still didn’t really understand those things very well.

So after that, whenever we handled something like a charger that conducts electricity, we made sure to have an electrical engineer inspect the internals very carefully.

Also, as I mentioned before, our overseas expansion failed too.

I thought that would probably work out too, but in reality it didn’t go well. Unlike weara and similar cases, even now I can’t think of what elements would have made it successful.

Even if I went back to that time with all the knowledge and experience I have now, I think it probably still would have been difficult to succeed with overseas expansion.

You can learn from failure, but the “real failure” I mentioned earlier is failure that comes precisely because you tried. You challenge yourself to do something new. But because that is what makes that person or that company original, if they don’t take on challenges, they lose what makes them distinctive—in other words, the reason it has to be them.

So I do think you should keep taking on challenges, and if you can learn from a failure, then it’s no longer really a failure. This is a famous idea too, of course.

Edison apparently said,“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”Or something like that.

He didn’t fail. In the end, if you keep finding, one by one, the ways that don’t work, you eventually arrive at the way that does work.

So the key to making a challenge succeed is not giving up.

Oh, that’s not giving up.

Exactly. I don’t think that counts as giving up at all.

After all, when something doesn’t exist in the world, there’s usually a reason it doesn’t exist.

Yes, because you can’t make it. Including cases where it’s technically impossible, that’s something you don’t really know until you try. But the times keep changing, and technology keeps evolving. There are many things that couldn’t be done before but can be done now.

To give just one example, with smartphones, I don’t think we could ever have made one in the very early days.

But as smartphones gradually matured and became more refined, the know-how for making them became standardized in China. Once that happened, a process was established where you could make one by combining things like a camera, display, memory, and SoC.

In our early days, it was like Microsoft told us, “You can make it this way,” and that made it possible. With wearables as well, things like step counting are now handled by sensors from the start.

Back in the Jawbone era, they had to train the system on human movement using accelerometer data and say, “If it moves like this, that counts as one step, two steps.” By the time we worked on it, the technology had already become mature, but it had also become feasible. There are many things that couldn’t be done in the past but can be done now.

Something may not have emerged because it couldn’t be done in the past, but it may be possible now. So in that sense, I think you have no choice but to take on the challenge at that moment. I’m not sure that having veterans is always necessarily a good thing.

Yes.

At Trinity, while doing various things, I tried not to keep too many specialists in-house. For example, if we decided to make a mobile phone and hired someone who said, “I used to make mobile phones,” first of all, we wouldn’t know whether that would become a successful product. And if it failed, I would feel bad if that person no longer had a place in the company.

Also, people with that much experience tend to be very fixed in ideas like “this is how it should be” or “this can’t be done.”

That person might have failed five or ten years ago and then think, “It failed, so we shouldn’t do this.” Many people don’t really shift to the idea that maybe it could be done now. They’ll say things like, “No, that’s absolutely impossible.” I’m the type who wants to reexamine things even if they were impossible before, so we end up clashing. (laughs)

Exactly. With veterans, conflicts can happen in that kind of way.

Yes.

Yes.

Right, right.

(laughs)

Ah, right, because it was pixelated.

I see.

Ah.

I see. By the way, what kind of good result was it? A higher rate of people clicking and buying?

I see. And was that the only metric?

I see. I do think there’s a bit of a question as to whether that alone is enough. If people buy without seeing the product, expectations differ from person to person, don’t they? They’re buying without really knowing what it is, right?

Ah, I see.

Ah, and those people were more likely to buy?

I was planning to bring this up after talking about Trinity,Eureka Studiowhich is a smartphone game company, and it also has the key principle of “not creating preconceptions.”

Our basic policy is to judge everything solely by data. We don’t decide whether a game is fun or not.

The users decide. No matter how fun we think it is, first, do users see the ad and install it? Then, after installing it, do they keep playing for a long time? If that data is bad, even if everyone is emotionally invested and believes, “This is definitely fun,” we stop. Our basic approach is not to hold on to regrets.

I thought it was somewhat similar in the sense that the key is not creating too many assumptions of our own.

Oddly enough, we have a game that’s selling pretty well right now.

But I genuinely don’t think that game is fun at all. (laughs)

Yes. But in this industry too, I’m not the target audience. I don’t usually play smartphone games. So I think my own opinion is the least useful.

For example, with weara, NuAns NEO, or Simplism, I’m one of the users myself, and I think, “I want this.” Part of the persona is basically me, so that’s fine.

But here, I’m not the target.

I’ll share my impressions, but my opinion doesn’t have much meaning, so I don’t get involved in decision-making.

Well, of course I do get involved with the data.

We’ve gone a little off track, but when people look back on their lives, whether in work or in their private lives, and I ask, “What gave you the greatest sense of accomplishment?” the answer that always comes up, from all kinds of people I’ve asked, is “something I challenged myself to do.”

I don’t think there are basically many people who feel a sense of accomplishment from something they could do easily. When people look back on their lives, most of them say that the best experience, the thing that gave them a sense of accomplishment, was something that was difficult, that they struggled with so much, that they didn’t know whether it would work out, but that they ultimately managed to achieve.

If you don’t take on challenges, that won’t happen.

Gajirou, looking back on your life so far, what work gave you the greatest sense of accomplishment?

Yeah.

Yeah, even in consulting, you had all kinds of projects, right? Among those, there must be some that immediately come to mind—ones where you felt, “I really saw this through,” or “I felt a real sense of accomplishment,” right?

And those would naturally be the really difficult projects, wouldn’t they?

In other words, you had so much anxiety that the thought crossed your mind that it might never work out, but then you still produced results.

I think the results you get after taking on a situation where things might not go well, where you might fail, and challenging it with everything you’ve got—that’s what really gives you a sense of accomplishment.

If, in consulting, you simply helped something that was already going well grow a little more, that might be good work, but in terms of a sense of accomplishment, I don’t think you would feel it that strongly.

Exactly.

Right. In Real Management, I think I talked quite a bit in the early days about stories of things that went well. But while also sharing stories of failure, I really want the people listening to try taking on challenges. It doesn’t have to be some grand challenge like, “Okay, let’s go to Jupiter.”

But even if something is difficult, or even if you can’t foresee the outcome yourself, I want you to challenge yourself if it’s something you want to do. When it goes well, you often gain a truly great sense of accomplishment, and even if you fail, as long as it’s something you thought hard about and worked on with all your effort, you will definitely gain something from it. I really hope you’ll try challenging yourself without fearing failure.

Yes.

Yeah, in that sense, I think that’s true. I think they’ll learn something one way or another.

For example, with the “failure without thinking” that we talked about at the beginning, I think there is a chance they’ll learn that they failed because they weren’t thinking.

Yes.

Ah, I see what you mean.

Yes.

Yes.

I see. Well, that might differ depending on the type of person. There are people in the world who can keep taking swings even if they forget things.

That’s right. To repeat myself, people who have never failed are people who haven’t taken on challenges. Even if you fail once, there is a second time, and if you keep in mind, “I’ve only found a way that doesn’t work; somewhere along the line, something should work,” and keep challenging yourself, I think you’ll end up with many things that give you a sense of accomplishment when you look back on your life.

I really hope you’ll continue taking on challenges.

So, that’s all for this week. We’ll be back with a different theme from next week onward, so thank you in advance.

“Real Management | The Successes and Failures of Corporate Management, Told as They Are: The Unscripted Reality of Company Presidents”

We’ve included a link to this program’s website in the description. We’d be happy to receive your thoughts, messages, and requests there.

Your hosts have been Hossy, also known as Hoshikawa Tetsushi, and

Until next week, we’ll talk to you again then.