Management’s Point of View ~ Our Beer Bash and Some Thoughts on Corporate Culture ~

October 29, 2026

Occasionally people tell me, “It’s amazing you manage every month to write a newsletter.” Since writing isn’t my day job, drafting these columns is a pretty big challenge. Even for a piece of two or three pages, it takes me at least four hours—and sometimes as long as eight. Since AI has advanced so much, I’ve even tried letting it write for me, but the results never match my style. It’s useful for brainstorming, but in the end, I write it myself. During my regular workday, I’m distracted by back-to-back meetings and constant work-related communications, so I usually write it alone on the weekends. I’ve been doing this every month for about eight years now.

It’s hard work, but I keep writing because I want our employees to become outstanding professionals. As you may know, every week at our Beer Bash, we discuss what our company should aspire to be, and in the final week, I summarize those discussions and share them with everyone in English. We cover a variety of topics at the Beer Bash events, but very few people can put what we discuss into practice just because we’ve talked about it once. We need to think about the same things over and over again, and to internalize them through repeated trial and error.

When you reflect on why you failed or succeeded, without a guiding framework, your judgment can easily waver. I write this monthly column so that when we encounter a problem, we can refer back to it immediately, just like a dictionary. Originally, I distributed this internally, but to help others understand what kind of company we are, I began writing it in column format for external audiences—and that is how “From Management’s Point of View” came to be.

As the great business leaders of the past have taught us, I too believe that both philosophy and practical application are essential to management. Practical application, for example, means that a bakery must bake delicious bread and build a profitable business. Philosophy means creating a corporate culture where employees think, “I want to work at this bakery, not any other,” and customers think, “This is definitely the bakery I prefer to buy from.” Only when these two elements work in tandem can a company grow.

Most business leaders recognize the importance of corporate culture. However, very few make a sustained effort to build it. This may be because, even though they understand corporate culture in theory, they don’t know how to build the ideal culture they envision—or perhaps because, at times, their vision of that ideal is still vague. In any case, it’s rare to encounter business leaders who actively and consistently work to build a corporate culture.

I knew corporate culture was important, but I never had the opportunity to learn about management directly from anyone. I also developed our Beer Bash by trial and error, based on what I had read and heard in books, as a means to bring out the best in my employees, convey my ideas, and grow together.

I never aspired to become a business leader, and even now, I don’t consider myself a skilled manager or think I’m cut out for it. In fact, I’m certain that I’m not a natural-born business leader. Lacking talent and with no one to teach me business, I had no choice but to learn through self-study, drawing on the wisdom of those who came before me from their books. At the same time, I fully understood that the company couldn’t survive on my talent alone. That’s why, through our Beer Bash events, I repeatedly conveyed the mindset the company needed to my employees while drawing on their own wisdom—combining my abilities with theirs to shape what TOPC is all about.

If you believe corporate culture is important, start by visualizing how employees at your ideal company work, think about how to get there, and then keep doing it until that vision becomes firmly established as your company’s culture. Don’t give up just because you feel you lack talent; share your ideas with your employees, learn from them, and work together to build an even stronger mindset and culture for the company. Even if you lack skill, keep contributing whatever abilities you have to the company and your employees. I believe that’s what management is all about. So, I write “From Management’s Point of View” every month to organize my thoughts and share them with you all.