Kazuo Inamori

The question Inamori forces: how does one person build two giants in unrelated industries? Behind Kyocera and KDDI stands a method that fuses technology and philosophy into a single managerial discipline.

Born in 1932 in Kagoshima as the second of seven children, he survived childhood tuberculosis -- an encounter with mortality that marked his outlook. After studying organic chemistry at a local university, he joined Shofu Industries, a Kyoto insulator maker plagued by late paychecks, and threw himself into new-ceramic research. In 1959, with colleagues and a mentor's backing, he co-founded Kyoto Ceramic (now Kyocera) with 3 million yen in capital, turning fine ceramics -- then a niche technology -- into the backbone of semiconductor packaging and electronic components.

During Kyocera's growth he devised "amoeba management": splitting the organization into small autonomous units of five to fifty people, each tracking daily profit. The goal was not merely cost control but cultivating an ownership mentality in every employee. In 1984, seizing on telecom deregulation, he founded DDI (later KDDI) to challenge NTT's monopoly and reduce phone bills. DDI merged into KDDI in 2000, bringing genuine competition to Japan's telecom market for the first time.

Running through his career is Buddhist altruism (rita). Ordained as a Rinzai Zen priest in 1997, Inamori defined his corporate mission as pursuing all employees' material and spiritual well-being. Kyocera never posted a loss, and his management study group Seiwajuku attracted over ten thousand small-business owners worldwide.

His crowning feat was the 2010 JAL turnaround. Saddled with 2.3 trillion yen in debt, the airline was bankrupt. Inamori, then 78, accepted the chairmanship without pay, introduced amoeba accounting by route, and drove a cultural shift that produced record operating profits and a re-listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange within just two years. He died in August 2022 at the age of 90.