Olympus History

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Sifting through 100 ideas while breaking through the barrier of accepted wisdom

Market share is extremely important to a company, and I was impressed that Olympus was taking decisive action in response to a 2 percent decline in its share. I was extremely busy. We had completed the SLR camera, but we had announced that there would be around 285 system components, and we had completed only half of that number. It was at this time that they asked me to revive our fortunes in the 35mm compact camera market. Previously I had been the one to lead the charge carrying the banner, but I was also anxious to train my successors, and so I formed a team of 10 development engineers. I gave them a year to develop any 35mm compact camera that they wanted. While they were doing that I worked on the OM. Then one day they told me that they had finished and wanted me to look at their work. They had written about 100 ideas on a blackboard. I didn't want them to make 100 cameras, so I told them to reduce the number. A few months later they had whittled the list down to 10. “It's still too many,” I told them. “There should be no more three.” At the end of the year they said they were ready for me to look at their idea. I had made a point of not involving myself in their day-to-day efforts, and they had developed solidarity as a team. Autofocus technology had only just been introduced, and the Juspin Konica had only recently gone on sale. They told me that they had bought one, tried it, and found that it was very good. They were eager to make a camera like that. That was against my philosophy. The camera was already on sale and we would have simply become involved in a price war. I told them that if they liked that camera I'd buy them one each. That would only cost about 200,000 yen, compared with the hundreds of millions of yen needed for developing a new model. That was not a satisfactory end to a year's work. I told them to go back to the 100 ideas that they had originally produced. They had crossed out ideas to reduce the number, and their decisions had been guided by accepted wisdom. When they collected some of the better ideas from the rejected ones, a different response emerged. However, the results were still not quite in tune with my thinking, and so I was forced to make a choice and carry the banner once again.

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