If your company is about the size of 25 or 26 employees, management is almost ninety-nine percent of your problem. Even if the rest of the people are incompetent, you can’t complain about it. If there are about 25 or 26 people, it is impossible to gather so many outstanding leaders, so 99% is your problem. You have the key to whether the leaders are developed or the business will grow.

That said, it was a question about management, so I would like to tell you about the key part because there are people who work for large companies and people who work for small companies.

There is a big company called GE (General Electric) in America. It’s a big company that Edison created. I don’t know if this guy is brilliant or not but there was a famous manager whose name is Jack Welch.

Jack Welch must have given at least 600 lectures on management, in which he said, “I always said the same thing.” He kept saying the same thing around 600 times because it was necessary. What was the message? He said, “There are only two management secrets. To put it simply, there are two things.”

One is “who to use”, in other words, “who to promote.” One of the key points of management is “who do you promote and assign to the post”. The other thing is “prioritizing your work“. In a nutshell, these two things are what you should do as a manager. He gave lectures on this topic more than 600 times because managers in general are not capable of doing these two things. It’s not that easy.

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Choose People With High Aptitude or Integrity

It doesn’t seem that you have many talented people among your 20+ employees. However, you need to choose the right person judging from their personalities, the way of putting effort and aptitude. That is the starting point of whether your business will grow or not.

So, frankly speaking, I don’t think you’ll have much trouble choosing someone with a high aptitude for the job, but if you can’t find a person with aptitude, it’s good to choose someone who is sincere. I think it’s important to promote a sincere person to a higher position. If such aptitude and appropriate ability are not clearly understood, I think one of the ways for the company to prosper is to promote sincere people to the top.

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Every Morning, Think of the Most Important Things to Do at Work and Prioritize

Another thing is to prioritize your work. In the case of small and medium-sized enterprises or micro enterprises, many different jobs are jumbled up and there’s a high chance that you don’t know who’s doing what, and what you are doing. I think what Jack Welch was saying is true and applies also to the workers at smaller companies. It’s important to tell 20+ employees, “Let’s prioritize work” repeatedly.

When you go to work in the morning, you need to ask them, “What is the most important thing to do today?”, “What’s the second most important thing?”, “How about the third?”, “Shall we prioritize?” If you take care of the important things first, you will have fewer mistakes and a higher rate of success. You will raise your reputation.

However, if you fall into a situation where you don’t know what to do, it may cause you to lower your work efficiency. Phone calls or visitors come in, and so many other things happen at work and you often lose track of what you’re doing. That’s the difficult part, but it seems that people who can organize the order of work can become excellent and have high qualifications as managers.

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I Finished My Work in the Morning and Erased Other People’s Work as Well

When I was young, I was more interested in learning and wanted to study. However, as a proverb goes, “A man with no regular occupation can have no stability of mind”.

My family’s financial situation didn’t allow me to pursue higher education unless I earned steady income, so I became a full time employee. I’m a little embarrassed to say this but I chose to work for a company that offered two days off a week and paid well, which was quite rare at that time. I had job offers from major banks but the bankers were working on Saturdays at the time; they told me that they would work until 10 or 11 at night and Saturdays. “Are you physically tough?”, they asked me. I said, “yes, of course” but in my mind, I was thinking I shouldn’t take this job. (Audience laughed)

Trading companies are closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Their sales dept. tends to work long hours or entertain customers at night, and the accounting dept. extends their working hours during the fiscal term, but the finance dept. deals with banks. Banks close their shutters at 3pm so no one came to visit us nor we visited them after 3pm. You can finish your work early if you want. There are people who had to work until midnight because they couldn’t make the accounts balance. It was a tragedy when I was in the same team with people like that.

However, when I worked at my own pace, I finished all my work in the morning. Most of the time it’s over by noon. Everyone seems to be busy, but I finished everything in the morning, so I was free. Since I was free, people asked me to do a variety of tasks, and no matter what I was asked to do, everything got done quickly and it appeared that I’d got nothing on my plate all the time.

Because I finished work in the morning, no one got angry with me when I went home at 6 o’clock. I was allowed to go home early to study. Because of this, I was able to build a foundation for creating a religion later on. Of course, I studied business and economics, but I studied the basics of religions while working at the company. That’s the truth.

In conclusion, “Who should be promoted?” and “What should be the priority of work?”; If you always ask yourself these two questions every day, your business will surely become healthy and grow.

If you don’t know who to choose, choose the honest one. If one’s ability is cut for the spot, choose that person.

Then have all your employees practice prioritizing work. By doing that, you’re training them to be leaders. They’ll surely be able to manage people in the future.

These are the two things I’d like to tell you. Please contemplate on them; I think it will work.