Why Japanese companies do so many different things

Why Japanese companies do so many different things
26 minutes by David Oks

Toto, the Japanese toilet company, became a major supplier of a critical semiconductor component called the electrostatic chuck. Demand from AI data centers has driven this once minor division to become Toto's largest and most profitable business. This reflects something broader about Japanese companies: they tend to do many very different things at a high level of quality. Economists trace this to a distinct bundle of corporate practices built around lifetime employment, horizontal coordination, and reinvestment over shareholder returns, which excels at incremental refinement but struggles with radical innovation.

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The ask
5 minutes by Michael Lopp

Michael explains how experienced leaders handle unexpected meetings by identifying “The Ask” — the real reason the meeting exists. Through examples, he shows that leadership is not only about strategy and data, but also communication, trust, instinct, and long-term relationships. Effective leaders learn to uncover hidden needs, guide collaboration, and rely on experience-based intuition to make better decisions and build connections across teams.

Cheap turpentine
20 minutes by David Singleton

David shares the actual documents and rituals that ran his 18-person AI startup, not frameworks but real artifacts: offer letters, hiring processes, board memos, and weekly rhythms. The team kept meetings minimal, shipped code daily, and ran Friday hackathons where everyone logged product friction that fed directly into the next week's priorities. Transparency was radical, with full board decks and readouts shared openly with the whole team.

Prioritization happens in layers
7 minutes by Ant Murphy

Prioritization is not a single backlog exercise but a layered process that starts with vision, strategy, and outcomes before reaching ideas and tasks. Many teams struggle because they try to prioritize isolated backlog items without clear direction. By aligning decisions across these layers, teams can reduce complexity, focus on the highest-impact opportunities, and use frameworks like RICE more effectively within the right context.

Engineering metrics for beginners
10 minutes by Joseph Gefroh

Metrics are easy to misuse. The right approach is to track them only when you plan to act on them, and to understand what they actually measure before using them to judge performance. For engineering teams, three areas matter most: delivery pipeline health, system reliability, and product observability. Key delivery signals include deployment frequency, failure rates, and cycle time. For reliability, focus on uptime targets that fit your actual needs and fast incident recovery over avoiding incidents entirely.

And the most popular article from the last issue was:

• Barely treading water