December 15, 2023
Not long ago, I attended the premiere screening of Godzilla Minus One. The director and actors were there on the red carpet, and for the first time I got to see the interview process from the inside. Baby-faced actor Ryunosuke Kamiki looked like a very nice person, but he certainly didn’t look 30 years old. Director Takashi Yamazaki also appeared much younger than his nearly 60 years, while embodying a director’s sensibility and mysteriousness.
The movie starts from World War II, so I felt a little uneasy at first about this initial screening in the US, but the theater erupted in applause and cheers at the appearance of Godzilla, then went silent at the annihilation of the soldiers, as the audience gradually became absorbed into the world of the movie. The expression of Ryunosuke Kamiki as he fought with Godzilla was completely different from when he was walking on the red carpet, and I felt that I could see his professionalism as an actor. There was a standing ovation at the end, with seemingly unending applause and cheering.
On the way home, with a sense of excitement lingering in my mind, I recalled the words of the president of Toho International prior to the event. “This is the first time that we are organizing a premiere screening in the US. We hope that all of you will feel what it is that we are trying to communicate and achieve.” What knowledge, I wondered, is it that I am trying to spread.
As most of you reading this will know, our company’s mission is “Empower Company Empower You”, and this expresses the understanding of work that I have had in my heart since before founding the organization. That was the kind of work that I wanted to do, but there was the question of how to accomplish that mission, and I wasn’t able to communicate that properly to our employees.
Reflecting on that, I defined six coordinate axes that would be essential to our business: Tech, Service, Teamwork, Time, Ownership (Leadership), and Business Development. Then, in a series of discussions with some of our staff members over drinks, we came up with TOPC Axis currently consisting of 33 more elements that are required in order to support the original six primary axes.
But no matter how important I may hold this Axis conceptualization to be, it would be impossible to achieve company-wide results unless it permeates all of our employees so that they are able to implement it. I’ve come to realize that the most important role of a company president is to present and communicate certain things over and over so that they resonate in the hearts of the employees: the president’s philosophy for the company, their values, and their vision for how the employees will be able to grow and develop. With these things in mind, we created a weekly forum for staff members to share their thoughts on how they consider the Axis conceptualization and stories of their experiences at work. We have been discussing these things informally over drinks since the founding of TOPC Potentia, and this activity was named the Beer Bash. At the beginning, some staff members wondered, “What the heck is this?!” From about the 50th time, people started to get the idea. And after 100 times, everyone began to recognize the universal values of the Axis conceptualization within all aspects of our work. Eventually, suggestions came from employees as well as clients to try to explain the meaning of Axis in easy-to-understand terms, and that is how I started to insert this blog posting, “From the CEO’s Perspective,” in nearly every edition of our newsletter.
Compared to the premiere screening of Godzilla Minus One, our company’s “spreading knowledge” is no doubt a rather tedious undertaking. However, I discovered that Director Yamazaki’s background is actually in VFX/CGI. I imagine that he himself pored over the effects frame by frame, repeatedly inspecting and adjusting things thousands of times, with this tedious process resulting in a masterpiece. I am now convinced that it is exactly the kind of director who is capable of taking all those repetitive steps who, in the end, can create a movie whereby the audience can naturally accept the images being presented and be impressed and excited by them.
Asking myself what it is that I personally can do, the thing that I desire most is for all of our employees to continue to grow and develop while putting TOPC Axis into practice, thus becoming capable of transferring that significance over to our clients. When we become able to help guide our customers’ growth and evolution, I believe that will instill some measure of excitement, even if it’s not at the same level as Godzilla. In expectation of that day, I will continue to communicate via “From the President’s Perspective.” Our company is still in a developmental phase, so we may cause problems from time to time. Nevertheless, I ask for your ongoing support and understanding.
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