# 稻盛和夫 · Kazuo Inamori — 封面档案 ACF-01-00109

> 亚洲封面人物 Asia Cover Figure · 机器可读档案（LLM-ready）。本文件由官网结构化档案数据自动生成，供 AI 检索与引用。中文全文与英文全文对照编排。

## 档案元数据 Metadata

- 封面编码 ACF Code：**ACF-01-00109**
- 姓名 Name：稻盛和夫 / Kazuo Inamori
- 职务 Title：创始人 / Founder
- 公司 Company：京瓷/KDDI / Kyocera / KDDI
- 出生 Born：1932-01，日本鹿儿岛县鹿儿岛市 (Kagoshima, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan)
- 篇别 Category：商界逆行者（列传篇 / Biographies (Liezhuan)）
- 入档日期 Accessioned：2026-07-20
- 标签 Tags：经营之圣, 阿米巴经营, 敬天爱人, 作为人何谓正确, 六项精进, 经营十二条, 世界500强, 日航重建, 盛和塾, 京都奖, 利他经营, 东方管理哲学
- 永久档案链接 Archive URL：https://coverfigure.com/acf/ACF-01-00109/liezhuan
- English archive：https://coverfigure.com/acf/ACF-01-00109/liezhuan?lang=en
- 官网原文报道 Feature story：https://coverfigure.com/acf/figure/daoshenghefu

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## 卷首 Editorial Intro

在世界经营思想的谱系之中，稻盛和夫是少数将经营升华为哲学的实践者。他留下的不只是京瓷、KDDI两家世界五百强企业与日航重建的商业奇迹，更是一套以人心为原点、以现场为根基、可被反复验证的经营思想体系。当管理学日益沉迷于战略模型、资本运作与技术迭代之时，他用一生的劳作证明：经营的终极命题，始终绕不开"作为人，何谓正确"这一朴素追问。这套由数十年一线工作淬炼而成的思想，构成了他留给商业世界最珍贵的财富。

与本田宗一郎、松下幸之助、盛田昭夫那一代日本实业家不同，稻盛和夫并非天生的商业领袖。少年时代接连遭遇病痛、升学受挫、家境窘迫，踏入职场之初，又被抛入一家濒临倒闭的陶瓷工厂，周遭的同事纷纷逃离。正是在这段别无选择的岁月里，他没有等待外部环境好转，而是沉下心扎进实验室，在枯燥的材料试验之中，慢慢形成一套朴素的信念：境遇无法左右，但工作的态度可以由自己决定。离开松风工业之后，七位同伴以血印立誓，在一间仓库之中，京瓷就此启程。

往后数十年，他两次从零创业，一次临危受托拯救破产的日航。每一次重大抉择之前，他总会向内叩问，动机至善，私心了无。这套思考方式，不是书斋里推演出来的理论，而是从陶瓷烧结、订单攻坚、组织拆分、危机重组一件件具体工作里，反复打磨得出的行动准则。阿米巴经营、会计七原则、六项精进，这些广为传播的管理工具，只是这套哲学落地的手段，而非内核。内核始终是一种清醒的利他主义：企业不单要追求盈利，更要实现全体员工物质与精神两方面的幸福，并回馈社会。

这套经营思想越过国界，在中国企业家圈层激起长久的回响。张瑞敏、马云、曹德旺等一批经营者，都曾从他的实践之中汲取思考。但追捧并不等于可以直接照搬。不同的商业土壤、制度环境、组织文化，注定任何一套管理方法，都不能拿来即用。盛和塾在全球的传播，无数企业的尝试与碰壁，恰恰印证了这份思想的复杂性。

我们立此档案，并非要将稻盛和夫塑造成一位"经营之圣"，而是记录一位工程师出身的经营者，如何用一生的劳作，搭建一套知行合一的经营体系。他的成败、局限与启示，都是留给后世管理者一份厚重的参照。

——亚洲封面人物主编 子墨

On April 1, 1959, on the second floor of a borrowed warehouse in Haramachi, Saikyo, in Kyoto's Nakagyo Ward, the twenty-seven-year-old Kazuo Inamori and seven companions cut their fingers and pressed blood seals onto a written pledge: "We will stand united and accomplish an enterprise that serves the nation and its people; we set our blood seals here as witness." At the banquet celebrating the company's founding, the young man turned to the employees crammed into the warehouse and said something close to a madman's dream: "Right now all we can do is start in a rented warehouse, but one day we will surely be number one in Haramachi; after Haramachi comes number one in Saikyo, then number one in Kyoto, then number one in Japan; and once we are number one in Japan, we will set out to be number one in the world."[s11]

More than half a century later, the greater part of that table-thumping boast has been redeemed. Kyoto Ceramic grew into Kyocera, Daini-Denden grew into KDDI, and both companies successively entered the ranks of the Fortune Global 500; and at seventy-eight he took charge of the bankrupt Japan Airlines for no salary, transforming the carrier with 2.32 trillion yen in liabilities - the so-called symbol of Japan's economic decline - into one of the world's highest-margin airlines.[s7][s22] Entrepreneurs who have personally founded two Fortune Global 500 companies are rare enough anywhere in the world; the founder who, more than a decade after retiring and taking monastic vows, could a third time turn the tide at the moment of catastrophe remains, to this day, one man alone.[s2][s5]

Yet what truly set Inamori apart was never to be found in these figures. Japan's postwar industrial rise produced a pantheon of mythic managers: Soichiro Honda built Honda with a mechanic's fanaticism, Konosuke Matsushita raised the Panasonic empire with a merchant's shrewdness, and Akio Morita carried Sony into American living rooms with a globalist's eye. Inamori walked a different road. He was a ceramics engineer trained in a faculty of engineering, whose first lifelong companions were the powders and kiln fires inside insulating porcelain, and only later organizations, human hearts and philosophy. He held no MBA and knew nothing of fashionable management theory, but from the samurai afterglow of Kagoshima's goju education, from the meditation practice of Rinzai Zen, and from one near-bankrupt shop-floor crisis after another, he distilled a system that takes "the morality of being a person" as the very starting point of management: the yardstick for judging everything is not whether money can be made, but "what is right as a human being."[s14][s40]

That system has a sharp institutional shell, called amoeba management - splitting the company into countless small, self-accounting units so that every frontline employee keeps accounts, makes decisions and bears responsibility like an owner; and it has a soft spiritual core, called "revere the divine and love people," taken from the motto of his fellow Kagoshima native Saigo Takamori: stand in awe of the way of heaven, and benefit and love other people.[s30][s42] When orders collapsed to a tenth of their peak during the 1973 oil crisis, Kyocera did not lay off a single worker; before founding DDI in 1984 he asked himself every night before sleep whether his motive was pure; and when he set out to rebuild JAL in 2010, his first move was not to cut routes but to teach his managers "how a human being ought to live." These choices, close to counterintuitive by the standards of business-school textbooks, make up the underlying logic that carried him through four economic cycles.[s11][s31] The chronicles mostly record deeds; this chapter must record, beyond deeds, a state of mind. He defined the company as a place for "pursuing the material and spiritual happiness of all employees," donated his personal fortune to found the Kyoto Prize, entered the priesthood and begged alms after stomach cancer was found at sixty-five, and at seventy-eight answered his country's call without taking a single yen.[s8][s25] When China's entrepreneurs, squeezed between globalization and the economic cycle, went looking for answers, Zhang Ruimin of Haier said that "had we met Inamori earlier, Haier would have grown faster," Jack Ma flew twice to Japan to seek his counsel in moments of crisis, and Cho Dewang carved "revere the divine and love people" into the school motto of Fuyao University of Science and Technology.[s16][s18][s27] In an age that believes in strategy, capital and traffic above all else, why the plainest of moral imperatives turned out to be the most powerful of forces - that is the question this chapter sets out to pursue.

## 人物速览 Lead

稻盛和夫（1932年1月—2022年8月24日），日本鹿儿岛人，京瓷（Kyocera）与KDDI两家世界500强企业的创始人，被日本产业界与松下幸之助并称为“经营之神”，更被中国企业家群体尊为“经营之圣”。他出身清贫，少年罹患肺结核，升学屡试不第，大学毕业即遇萧条，入职濒临倒闭的松风工业，却在无人问津的精密陶瓷研究中合成出日本首创的镁橄榄石材料。1959年，27岁的他以300万日元资本金创办京都陶瓷，把一家租仓库开工的小厂带成全球精密陶瓷巨头，并创下上市后数十年从未亏损的纪录；1984年，52岁的他以“动机至善、私心了无”自誓，闯入NTT垄断的电信业创办第二电电，后合并为KDDI。2010年，78岁的他零薪酬出山，接掌负债2.32万亿日元、申请破产保护的日本航空，用“哲学共有”加“阿米巴核算”两年七个月使其重新上市，重建第二年营业利润达1884亿日元。他留下的“敬天爱人”“作为人，何谓正确”“六项精进”“经营十二条”与阿米巴经营模式，经由盛和塾一万五千名塾生与畅销数百万册的《活法》《干法》等著作，成为跨越国界与周期的东方商业智慧。[s1][s7][s11]

Kazuo Inamori (January 1932 - August 24, 2022), a native of Kagoshima in southern Japan, was the founder of two Fortune Global 500 companies, Kyocera and KDDI. In Japan's industrial establishment he was ranked alongside Konosuke Matsushita of Panasonic as one of the "gods of management"; among Chinese entrepreneurs he was revered by an even loftier title, the "sage of management." His beginnings were anything but auspicious. He grew up in poverty, contracted tuberculosis as a schoolboy, failed entrance examination after entrance examination, graduated into a deep recession, and took a job at Shofu Industries, an insulator maker on the brink of collapse - yet in its neglected fine-ceramics laboratory he synthesized forsterite, the first such material ever produced in Japan. In 1959, at twenty-seven, he founded Kyoto Ceramic with capital of just 3 million yen, and turned a small workshop opened in a rented warehouse into a global giant of precision ceramics, compiling a record of never posting an annual loss in the decades after listing. In 1984, at fifty-two, he swore to himself that his motive was "wholly good and utterly free of self-interest," charged into the telecommunications monopoly held by NTT and founded Daini-Denden, later merged into KDDI. In 2010, at seventy-eight, he came out of retirement for no salary at all to take charge of Japan Airlines, which had filed for bankruptcy protection with 2.32 trillion yen in liabilities; armed with "shared philosophy" and "amoeba accounting," he relisted the airline in two years and seven months, and in the second year of reconstruction it earned 188.4 billion yen in operating profit. The legacy he left behind - the maxims "revere the divine and love people" and "what is right as a human being," the Six Disciplines, the Twelve Management Principles, and the amoeba management system - spread through some 15,000 members of the Seiwajuku study circles and through multimillion-selling books such as A Compass to Fulfillment and The True Meaning of Work, becoming a body of Eastern business wisdom that crosses both national borders and economic cycles.[s1][s7][s11]

## 正文 Archive Chapters

### 1. 鹿儿岛的少年：乡中教育、肺病与卖纸袋的行商 / The Boy from Kagoshima: Goju Education, Tuberculosis and the Paper-Bag Peddler

1932年1月，稻盛和夫出生于日本鹿儿岛市药师町（现城西）一个经营印刷作坊的家庭，在七个兄弟姐妹中排行第二，家境清贫[s3][s11]。鹿儿岛是旧萨摩藩的故地，明治维新的策源地之一，西乡隆盛、大久保利通都出生在这片土地。当地保留着一种被称为“乡中教育”的传统：萨摩武士的子弟们聚在乡中，习武、读书、磨砺胆气，崇尚的是坚韧、正直与重义轻死。稻盛后来在自传中回忆，自己小时候是个爱哭、胆小、黏着母亲的孩子，而鹿儿岛这种独特的乡中教育，“能把胆小鬼变得坚强”[s3]。

少年时代的稻盛几乎尝遍了厄运。1944年，他报考鹿儿岛第一中学失败，只能进国民学校高等科；同年，他染上了当时被视为绝症的浸润性肺结核，被迫卧床[s3][s20]。他的叔叔和叔母都因肺结核去世，家里设了临时隔离区，少年稻盛在恐惧中走过病人的房门，拼命屏住呼吸——结果谨小慎微的他染了病，大大咧咧的父亲和哥哥反倒没事。病榻上，邻居送给他一本宗教思想家谷口雅春的《生命的真相》，书中“心中念想，就会投射为现实”一类的说法，在这个13岁少年心里埋下了一颗种子：人生的境遇，与内心的状态深相关联[s3]。这颗种子后来生长为他“心不唤物，物不至”的人生哲学[s14]。

1945年，战争末期的空袭烧毁了稻盛家的房子，也烧毁了印刷作坊的家业[s20]。肺结核奇迹般痊愈后，他升入私立鹿儿岛中学，又在1948年进入鹿儿岛市高等学校第三部（现鹿儿岛玉龙高等学校）[s3]。为了贴补家用，16岁的他开始行商卖纸袋。他把家里作坊印制的纸袋捆在自行车后座上，跑遍鹿儿岛的黑市和各家小店，还动脑筋把市场按区域划分、逐片攻克，一度几乎垄断了鹿儿岛中学生的纸袋生意[s20]。这是稻盛和夫人生中第一次“经营”——没有人教，他自己琢磨出了分区销售、直销铺货的土办法，也第一次尝到了靠自己的努力赚钱养家的滋味。晚年他多次说，这段行商经历让他对“销售”和“现场”有了身体层面的记忆[s3][s20]。

1951年，稻盛考入鹿儿岛大学工学部应用化学专业[s3][s20]。这所创办于战后不久的地方大学，远不是他最初的志向——他曾两次报考大阪大学等名校落榜，一度灰心到在鹿儿岛街头徘徊，甚至认真考虑过加入黑社会，还真的去黑道事务所门口实地考察过，最终被理智拉回[s11]。进了大学后，他把全部精力投入学业，尤其迷上了当时新兴的精细化学与陶瓷材料。1955年毕业前夕恰逢战后经济萧条，就业困难，他四处求职碰壁，几乎走投无路，最后靠大学教授的介绍，才获得一个去京都绝缘子制造商松风工业工作的机会[s1][s3]。多年以后回头看，鹿儿岛赋予他的东西——乡中教育里那份不屈不挠的“萨摩隼人”气质、肺病中对心灵力量的初次体悟、卖纸袋时摸爬滚打的行商经验——恰好构成了这位未来经营者最底层的三样底色：坚韧、心性与现场感。他把西乡隆盛“敬天爱人”四个字记了一辈子，那是故乡先贤留给这个小城青年最贵重的遗产[s30][s14]。

在鹿儿岛大学读书时，稻盛和夫还经历了一件影响他金钱观的小事。当时他靠家里微薄的接济和打工维持学业，一次在黑市上换钱被骗、被赖账，让他早早见识了人情冷暖，也让他对“信义”二字格外较真。学业上他格外拼命，有机化学方向的研究室竞争激烈，他转而专攻当时冷门的无机化学（陶瓷方向），毕业论文做的是高岭土的耐热性研究，这为他日后投身精密陶瓷埋下了专业伏笔[s3][s20]。值得一提的是，少年稻盛并不是一个循规蹈矩的“乖学生”，他爱打架、好逞强，是孩子王，但在乡中教育的熏陶下，这份好强逐渐转化为一种近乎执拗的正义感——遇到不公的事，他敢站出来说话；认定正确的事，他绝不轻易妥协。这种性格后来在松风工业顶撞技术部长、在京瓷为员工利益彻夜长谈、在日航把毛巾丢向刁难他的干部等事件中反复出现[s13][s11]。

多年以后，稻盛在《活法》中回望这段充满挫败的早年，得出的结论不是“苦难是财富”的廉价鸡汤，而是一个更硬的判断：“艰难困苦，正是机会。”他认为，逆境是上天为了提升人而特意赐予的磨练和考验，倒霉也罢、厄运也罢，忍受它们、保持开朗的心境朝前看、坚持努力不懈怠，这就是人生[s14][s40]。卖纸袋的行商经历还让他养成了伴随一生的“现场感”——他后来反复对经营者强调，答案永远在现场，不在会议室的报表里；一个从十几岁就骑着自行车跑街铺货的人，天然就懂这个道理[s20][s33]。鹿儿岛的山水、萨摩的遗风、肺病中的生死体验、黑市里的信义课，最终都沉淀为这个年轻人性格的底色。当1955年他离开故乡前往京都时，他还只是一个前途未卜的地方大学毕业生；但他行囊里带着的那样东西——一套从苦难里长出来的、关于人该如何活、如何做事的朴素信念——日后将被证明比任何名校文凭都更有价值。

离开鹿儿岛那年，稻盛和夫身上几乎没有任何“成功者”的征兆：两次落第、一场大病、毕业即失业，连进松风工业都是靠教授人情安排的退路[s11][s14]。但恰恰是这个接连受挫的青年，后来在总结人生时反复说，“人生中遭遇的一切苦难，都是包装好的礼物”——关键在于你有没有勇气拆开它[s14][s40]。他在松风工业的破实验室里拆到了第一份礼物：当同期大学生全部离去、他被逼到只剩“埋头工作”这一条路时，镁橄榄石的窑火第一次为他点燃。从乡中教育里学来的不屈、从肺病中学来的对“心”的敏感、从卖纸袋里学来的现场直觉，都在那间实验室里汇到了一起。多年以后，盛和塾的年轻经营者问他成功的秘诀，他给出的答案朴素得近乎刻板：“没有比年轻时的挫折和劳苦更值钱的财富了。年轻时一帆风顺的人，往往成不了大器。”[s21][s14] 这句从他自己的鹿儿岛岁月里长出来的话，日后将成为他全部经营哲学的起点。

**English:** Kazuo Inamori was born in January 1932 in Yakushi-cho (today's Josai district) of Kagoshima City, the second of seven children in a household that ran a small printing workshop, and the family was poor.[s3][s11] Kagoshima was the old domain of Satsuma, one of the seedbeds of the Meiji Restoration; both Saigo Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi had been born on that soil. The region preserved a tradition known as goju education: the sons of Satsuma samurai gathered in neighborhood circles to practice martial arts, study the classics and sharpen their courage, prizing toughness of spirit, uprightness and a sense of righteousness that counted life itself as light. Inamori later recalled in his autobiography that as a small child he had been a tearful, timid boy who clung to his mother's sleeve, and that Kagoshima's singular goju education "could turn a coward strong."[s3]

Misfortune of nearly every kind came to him in boyhood. In 1944 he failed the entrance examination for First Kagoshima Junior High School and had to enroll in a national post-elementary school; that same year he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, then regarded as a fatal disease, and was confined to his bed.[s3][s20] His uncle and aunt had both died of the illness, and the house had a makeshift isolation area; the boy Inamori would walk past the sickroom door in terror, holding his breath for all he was worth - with the wry result that the careful, fearful one fell ill while his blithely unconcerned father and elder brother stayed well. On his sickbed a neighbor lent him The Truth of Life by the religious thinker Masaharu Taniguchi, and arguments in the book along the lines of "what the mind holds within itself projects outward into reality" planted a seed in the thirteen-year-old: the circumstances of a person's life are deeply bound up with the state of his heart. That seed would later grow into his life philosophy that "what the mind does not summon will not come."[s3][s14]

In 1945, the air raids of the war's final months burned down the Inamori family's house and the printing workshop along with it.[s20] After his tuberculosis healed, almost miraculously, he went on to the private Kagoshima Junior High School, and in 1948 he entered the Third District Kagoshima Senior High School, today known as Kagoshima Gyokuryu Senior High School.[s3] To help support the household, the sixteen-year-old took up peddling paper bags. He strapped the bags printed by his family's workshop onto the back of a bicycle and covered the black markets and little shops of Kagoshima, shrewdly dividing the market into territories and conquering them one by one, until he had nearly cornered the paper-bag trade among Kagoshima's middle-school students.[s20] It was Kazuo Inamori's first venture in "management" - no one taught him; he worked out for himself the homespun methods of territorial selling and direct distribution, and he tasted for the first time what it meant to earn money by his own exertion to feed a family. In old age he said many times that those peddling years left him with a bodily, physical memory of both "sales" and "the gemba," the place where the real work happens.[s3][s20]

In 1951 Inamori was admitted to the Faculty of Engineering at Kagoshima University, in the Department of Applied Chemistry.[s3][s20] This regional university, founded not long after the war, was nowhere near his original ambition: he had twice failed the entrance examinations for elite schools such as Osaka University, wandered the streets of Kagoshima in such despair that he seriously considered joining a criminal syndicate, and even went to scout the gangsters' office doorway in person before reason pulled him back.[s11] Once at university he threw all his energy into his studies, and was especially captivated by the then-new fields of fine chemistry and ceramic materials. When he graduated in 1955, into the teeth of a postwar recession in which jobs were desperately scarce, his applications were turned down everywhere and he seemed at the end of his rope; only through the introduction of a university professor did he finally obtain a position at Shofu Industries, a Kyoto manufacturer of insulators.[s1][s3] Looking back years later, the things Kagoshima had given him - the indomitable spirit of the "Satsuma hayato" warriors bred into him by goju education, his first intimation of the power of the mind during his illness, and the hard-knuckled peddler's experience of the street - turned out to be exactly the three base colors of the future manager: toughness of spirit, mastery of the mind, and the instinct for the gemba. He carried Saigo Takamori's four characters, "revere the divine and love people," with him for the rest of his life; it was the most precious bequest the sages of his hometown left to the young man from a small city.[s30][s14]

While studying at Kagoshima University, Inamori also lived through a small episode that shaped his attitude toward money. He was scraping through on a meager allowance from home and on part-time jobs, and when he was once cheated and stiffed out of money at the black market, he learned early just how cold and warm the world can be - and became all the more uncompromising about the two characters "trust and integrity." In his studies he drove himself ferociously: the laboratory for organic chemistry was fiercely competitive, so he turned instead to the then-unfashionable field of inorganic chemistry, the ceramics track, and wrote his graduation thesis on the heat resistance of kaolin clay - professional groundwork, as it turned out, for his future life in precision ceramics.[s3][s20] It is worth noting that the young Inamori was no rule-following model pupil: he loved fights and liked to show his strength, and he was the king of the neighborhood children. Yet under the influence of goju education, that competitiveness slowly transformed into an almost obstinate sense of justice - when he saw something unfair he dared to speak up, and once he was convinced a thing was right he would not easily back down. That same temper was to surface again and again: in his confrontation with the technical director at Shofu Industries, in his all-night talks at Kyocera fighting for his employees' interests, and in the towel he flung at a defiant manager at Japan Airlines.[s13][s11]

Years later, looking back on those defeat-strewn early years in A Compass to Fulfillment, his conclusion was not the cheap broth of "hardship is wealth" but a harder judgment: "Hardship and difficulty are precisely where opportunity lies." He believed that adversity was the tempering and trial that heaven deliberately grants in order to elevate a person; whether the bad luck is ill fortune or sheer misfortune, to endure it, to keep a cheerful heart and look forward, and to persist in effort without slackening - that, he said, is what life consists of.[s14][s40] The paper-bag peddling also gave him the lifelong "gemba sense" that accompanied him ever after: he would later insist to managers, again and again, that the answer is always to be found in the field, never in the reports of the conference room; and a man who from his mid-teens had ridden a bicycle through the streets laying out goods understood that truth by instinct.[s20][s33] The mountains and waters of Kagoshima, the afterglow of Satsuma, the life-and-death experience of tuberculosis and the lesson in trust learned in the black market all settled, in the end, into the base colors of the young man's character. When he left his hometown for Kyoto in 1955, he was still nothing more than a regional-university graduate with an uncertain future; but the thing he carried in his traveling bag - a set of plain beliefs about how a person ought to live and how work ought to be done, beliefs that had grown out of suffering - would prove more valuable than any diploma from a famous school.

In the year he left Kagoshima, Kazuo Inamori displayed almost no symptom of future success: two failed examinations, a grave illness, unemployment at graduation, and even the job at Shofu Industries obtained only as a fallback through a professor's favor.[s11][s14] Yet it was precisely this serially thwarted young man who later said, when summing up life, that "every hardship encountered in life comes as a gift already wrapped" - the only question being whether you have the courage to unwrap it.[s14][s40] He unwrapped his first gift in the broken laboratory of Shofu Industries: when all the other graduates hired the same year had left and he was driven to the single remaining road of burying himself in his work, the kiln fire of forsterite was first lit for him. The resilience learned from goju education, the sensitivity to "the heart" learned from tuberculosis, and the gemba intuition learned from selling paper bags all converged in that one laboratory. Years afterward, when young managers of the Seiwajuku study circles asked him the secret of success, the answer he gave was plain to the point of rigidity: "There is no wealth more valuable than the setbacks and toil of youth. Those whose early years are plain sailing seldom turn into great vessels."[s21][s14] That sentence, grown out of his own Kagoshima years, was to become the starting point of his entire management philosophy.

### 2. 松风工业：破厂里的镁橄榄石与血印创业 / Shofu Industries: Forsterite in a Crumbling Factory and the Blood-Sealed Founding

1955年4月，稻盛和夫进入京都的松风工业株式会社，被分配研究特殊陶瓷（新型陶瓷）[s1][s20]。这家曾经生产高压绝缘子的老牌企业当时已濒临破产：管理层内斗不断，工资迟发是常事，连工会都组织不起像样的活动。和他同期入职的几个大学毕业生很快失望透顶，纷纷跳槽，有人约他一起去自卫队应聘，连报名表都填了——但他入职时的押金拿不回来，哥哥拒绝寄钱，他最终没走成。半年后，同期进厂的大学生走得精光，只剩稻盛一个人[s11]。朋友调侃他：“在那样的公司，连媳妇都娶不着哦！”[s11]

被逼到墙角的稻盛做出一个改变一生的决定：不再抱怨，把全部身心扑到研究上。他干脆把被褥、锅和炭炉搬进了研究室，吃住都在实验室，从早到晚反复做配比、烧结和测试[s11]。当时公司接下松下电子工业（后来的松下电器产业）一批电视机显像管用U型绝缘陶瓷部件的订单，这种部件需要一种具备高频绝缘特性的新型陶瓷材料，技术难度极高，多家大公司都在攻关。稻盛带领一个小团队日夜摸索，竟在1956年于日本首次成功合成了镁橄榄石（forsterite）陶瓷，并据此开发出U型凯尔西马（Kelcima）绝缘子，顺利交付松下[s20][s22]。这一成果让摇摇欲坠的松风工业拿到了宝贵订单，也让24岁的稻盛第一次体会到：当一个人把自己逼到绝境、付出不亚于任何人的努力时，连命运都会让路。

然而技术上的成功并没有换来体制内的坦途。1958年，稻盛在新一代陶瓷产品的技术开发方针上与新来的技术部长发生激烈分歧，他坚持的路线被粗暴否定，一怒之下辞去了在松风工业的工作[s20][s24]。他的直属上司青山政次欣赏这个年轻人的才华与骨气，带着他四处奔走，找到青山的旧友、宫木电机的西枝一江和交川有等人出资，决意创办一家新公司[s20][s24]。西枝一江甚至把自家房产作抵押，从银行贷出1000万日元作为设备投资款。1958年12月，稻盛与松风工业时期的同事须永朝子结婚[s20]。

1959年4月1日，京都陶瓷株式会社（现京瓷）在京都市中京区西京原町成立，资本金300万日元，包括稻盛在内共28名员工[s3][s37]。创业之初，追随他从松风工业辞职出来的七名骨干都是二十出头的年轻人，他们写下一份誓词：“我们团结一致，成就一番利国利民的事业，在此以血印为证。”稻盛带头签字，割破手指按下血印[s11]。在公司成立的庆祝会上，他立誓要从“原町第一”做到“世界第一”[s11][s30]。

公司虽小，稻盛却在创业第三年就完成了一次决定企业基因的“理念升级”。1961年，一批高中学历的年轻员工集体向他提出强硬要求：要求公司保证定期加薪、奖金，否则就集体罢工。稻盛把他们邀到自己的住处，彻夜长谈，谈自己创业的抱负，也谈公司眼下的艰难，最后以诚意化解了对峙[s20]。这场冲突深深刺痛了他：他意识到，仅靠“要让稻盛和夫的技术问世”这种个人梦想，无法支撑员工把一生托付给公司。1967年，他把京瓷的经营理念正式定为：“追求全体员工物质与精神两方面幸福的同时，为人类和社会的进步与发展做出贡献。”[s20][s24] 这一条理念，此后被他原封不动带到KDDI，又在2010年一字不改地写进日航——员工第一、客户第二、股东最后，这个排序贯穿了他整个经营生涯[s13][s33]。

关于镁橄榄石的研发，稻盛和夫后来多次讲过一个近乎传奇的细节。合成这种陶瓷需要在高温烧制过程中让粉体均匀黏结，当时关键的技术瓶颈是找不到合适的黏结剂。他日思夜想，某天在实验室里被一桶松香绊了一下，差点摔倒，情急之下扶住设备——这个意外让他灵光一闪：能否用松香类物质做黏合剂？他立刻反复试验，最终找到了让陶瓷粉体在烧结中致密结合的工艺路径[s11][s20]。这个故事在他口中被赋予了更深的含义：“答案在现场”，当你抱着产品睡、全身心投入时，神佛或说潜意识会在某个瞬间给你启示[s33][s39]。无论灵光是否真的来自那一绊，扎实的事实是：一个进厂才一年多、被同事抛下的24岁年轻人，在一家濒临倒闭的工厂里，做出了日本第一的新型陶瓷材料。

松风工业的岁月还给了稻盛另外两笔财富。一笔是婚姻：他与同事须永朝子相知相爱，1958年结为夫妇，朝子在他创业最艰难的岁月里操持家务、默默支撑[s20]。另一笔是“人的教训”。在松风，他亲眼看到一家有技术、有历史的企业，如何因为管理层内斗、缺乏共同理念、对员工漠不关心而走向衰败；他也亲身尝到了“打工者”的无力——当你的技术理想与官僚化的上司冲突时，再正确的判断也无处安放[s11][s20]。这让他在创办京瓷后形成了两条坚定不移的原则：第一，经营必须有超越个人野心的大义名分，让全体员工发自内心认同；第二，经营者必须“玻璃般透明”，让员工随时看清公司的真实状况，因为信任只能建立在信息公开之上[s22][s33]。

创业之初的京瓷条件极其简陋。厂房是借用的宫木电机仓库二楼，设备陈旧，资本金只有300万日元，连像样的待遇都给不出。稻盛后来回忆，在“什么物质条件都不具备的情况下，要让大家一起拼命干活，必须以创业时的‘血盟’精神作为企业经营的基础”[s14]。那纸血印誓词不是表演，而是这群年轻人在一穷二白中彼此托付性命的契约。正是从这份契约出发，他后来提出“以心为本”的经营——企业不是资本的集合，而是一群人以信任为纽带结成的共同体；经营者最重要的能力，不是算计，而是赢得人心[s14][s42]。血印按下的那一天，现代日本商业史上最独特的一家企业，以及最独特的一种经营哲学，同时诞生了。

**English:** In April 1955 Kazuo Inamori entered Shofu Industries Co., Ltd. in Kyoto and was assigned to research on special ceramics, the so-called new ceramics.[s1][s20] This venerable old firm, which had once made high-voltage insulators, was by then on the brink of ruin: the management was riven by factional infighting, wage delays were a matter of course, and even the labor union could not organize a single respectable event. The several other university graduates hired with him were quickly disillusioned and one after another jumped ship; someone invited him to apply together for the Self-Defense Forces, and the application forms were already filled out - but the deposit he had paid on taking his job could not be recovered, his brother refused to send him the money, and in the end he could not leave. Half a year later, the university graduates who had entered the plant together were all gone, and Inamori alone remained.[s11] Friends teased him: "At a company like that, you won't even be able to find a wife!"[s11]

Pinned against the wall, Inamori made the decision that changed his life: he stopped complaining and threw his whole heart and soul into research. He simply moved his bedding, his cooking pot and his charcoal stove into the laboratory, ate and slept there, and repeated formulations, firings and tests from morning to night.[s11] At that time the company had taken an order from Matsushita Electronics Industrial, later Matsushita Electric Industrial, for U-shaped insulating ceramic components used in the cathode-ray tubes of television sets; the components required a new ceramic material with high-frequency insulation properties, the technical difficulty was extreme, and several large companies were racing to crack it. Inamori led a small team in day-and-night experimentation, and in 1956 they became the first in Japan to synthesize forsterite ceramics successfully, on the basis of which he developed the U-shaped Kelcima insulator and delivered the order smoothly to Matsushita.[s20][s22] The achievement won the tottering Shofu Industries its precious orders, and it let the twenty-four-year-old Inamori feel for the first time that when a person drives himself to the edge and exerts an effort second to none, even fate steps aside to let him pass.

Technical success, however, did not buy him a smooth path inside the establishment. In 1958 Inamori fell into fierce disagreement with a newly arrived technical director over the development policy for the next generation of ceramic products; the course he insisted on was brusquely rejected, and in a fury he resigned from Shofu Industries.[s20][s24] His immediate supervisor, Masaji Aoyama, admired the young man's talent and backbone, and took him around to raise money from Aoyama's old friends Ichie Nishieda and Tamotsu Majikawa of Miyaki Electric and others, resolved to found a new company together.[s20][s24] Nishieda even mortgaged his own house to borrow 10 million yen from the bank as funds for equipment investment. In December 1958 Inamori married Asako Sunaga, his colleague from Shofu Industries.[s20]

On April 1, 1959, Kyoto Ceramic Co., Ltd. - today's Kyocera - was established in Haramachi, Saikyo, Nakagyo Ward of Kyoto City, with capital of 3 million yen and twenty-eight employees including Inamori himself.[s3][s37] At the founding, the seven core followers who had resigned from Shofu Industries to follow him were all young men in their early twenties, and they wrote out a pledge: "We will stand united and accomplish an enterprise that serves the nation and its people; we set our blood seals here as witness." Inamori signed first, cut his finger and pressed his blood seal.[s11] At the banquet celebrating the company's founding, he vowed to climb from "number one in Haramachi" all the way to "number one in the world."[s11][s30]

Small as the company was, Inamori completed, in its third year, an "upgrade of philosophy" that would determine the firm's DNA. In 1961 a group of young employees with high-school diplomas confronted him collectively with hard demands: the company must guarantee regular pay raises and bonuses, or they would walk out in a collective strike. Inamori invited them to his lodgings and talked through the night, speaking both of his ambitions in founding the company and of the hard straits it was in, until in the end his sincerity dissolved the confrontation.[s20] The conflict stung him deeply: he realized that a personal dream such as "letting Kazuo Inamori's technology see the light of day" could never sustain employees who were entrusting their entire lives to the company. In 1967 he formally fixed Kyocera's management rationale as: "to pursue the material and spiritual happiness of all employees, and at the same time to contribute to the progress and development of humankind and society."[s20][s24] That single tenet was later carried by him word for word into KDDI, and in 2010 was written unchanged into Japan Airlines - employees first, customers second, shareholders last, an ordering that ran through his entire career as a manager.[s13][s33]

Concerning the forsterite research, Inamori later told many times an almost legendary detail. Synthesizing the ceramic required the powder to bind uniformly during high-temperature firing, and the greatest technical bottleneck at the time was finding a suitable binder. He thought about it day and night, and one day in the laboratory he tripped over a bucket of pine resin and nearly fell; in the panic he grabbed hold of the equipment to steady himself - and the accident gave him a flash of inspiration: could a resin-like substance serve as the binder? He immediately tested the idea again and again, and in the end found the process path that let the ceramic powder bond densely during sintering.[s11][s20] In his telling the story carried a deeper meaning: "The answer is in the gemba"; when you sleep embracing your product and commit yourself body and soul, the divine - or, if you like, the subconscious - grants you its hint in a single instant.[s33][s39] Whether the flash truly came from that stumble or not, the solid fact stands: a twenty-four-year-old who had been at the plant barely over a year, abandoned by his colleagues, produced Japan's first new-ceramic material inside a factory on the edge of collapse.

The Shofu years gave Inamori two other treasures as well. One was his marriage: he came to know and love his colleague Asako Sunaga and they married in 1958, and through the hardest years of the startup she kept the household running and supported him in silence.[s20] The other was "the lesson about people." At Shofu he saw with his own eyes how a company with technology and history could slide toward ruin through management infighting, the absence of a shared philosophy and indifference toward its employees; and he tasted in his own person the powerlessness of the hired hand - when your technical ideals collide with a bureaucratized superior, even the most correct judgment has nowhere to land.[s11][s20] That experience led him, after founding Kyocera, to two unshakable principles: first, management must possess a noble cause that rises above personal ambition, one to which every employee can assent from the heart; and second, the manager must practice "glass-clear, transparent management," letting employees see the true condition of the company at any time, because trust can be built only on open information.[s22][s33]

Kyocera's conditions at the founding were of the utmost crudeness. The workshop was the second floor of a warehouse borrowed from Miyaki Electric, the equipment was aged, the capital was a mere 3 million yen, and the company could not offer even a respectable level of pay. Inamori later recalled that "in conditions where we possessed no material resources whatsoever, to make everyone work desperately together we had to make the blood-brotherhood spirit of the founding the very foundation of our management."[s14] That sheet of blood-sealed vows was no performance; it was the contract by which these young people entrusted their lives to one another in the midst of utter destitution. It was precisely from that contract that he later derived his idea of "management based on the bond of human minds": the company is no aggregation of capital but a community of people bound together by trust, and the manager's most important ability is not calculation but the power to win people's hearts.[s14][s42] On the day the blood seals were pressed, one of the most distinctive companies in the history of modern Japanese business - and one of its most distinctive management philosophies - were born together.

### 3. 京瓷崛起：精密陶瓷、IBM订单与从未亏损的奇迹 / Kyocera Rises: Precision Ceramics, the IBM Order and the Miracle of Never a Loss

京瓷的立身之本是精密陶瓷。这种用高纯度无机粉体经高温烧结而成的新型材料，具备金属所没有的绝缘性、耐热性与耐磨性，正是电子工业起飞时代的关键基础材料。稻盛和夫带着从松风工业练就的技术功底，让这家28人的小厂从一开始就站在了产业链最硬的环节上[s3][s22]。

1960年代，京瓷迎来第一次决定性的国际检验。美国IBM公司向全球供应商订购大型计算机用的氧化铝陶瓷基板，这种基板尺寸大、精度要求苛刻到近乎极限，京瓷在数家竞标者中脱颖而出拿到订单。初期交付的产品大量不合格，被IBM印上“次品”字样退回，稻盛和技术人员吃住都在车间，反复改进成型与烧结工艺，最终攻克难关，稳定供货[s3][s14]。拿下IBM订单不仅带来了收入，更重要的是让“京瓷制造”获得了全球电子产业的信任背书——能通过IBM质检的陶瓷部件，等于拿到了进入世界市场的通行证。京瓷此后陆续为英特尔等半导体厂商供应IC封装用陶瓷多层基板，1969年鹿儿岛川内工厂建成投产，专事IC用陶瓷多层封装；1972年，京瓷凭“大规模集成电路用陶瓷多层封装的开发”荣获日本第18届大河内纪念生产特别奖[s23][s37]。

在技术之外，稻盛这一时期还做了两件影响深远的事。第一件是组织创新。1963年滋贺蒲生工厂建成后，京瓷形成两地工厂体制，规模迅速扩大，1964年员工已达约150人[s11][s22]。稻盛敏锐地感到危机：“京瓷是靠着满腔热情迅速成长起来的，但会不会很快失去开拓者的热忱，沦为一家毫无斗志的公司呢？”[s11] 他怀念创业初期那种营销员跑回车间喊“接到订单了”、深夜加班有人买来一碗乌冬面全工厂沸腾的状态。他给出的解法是：“只要回到创业之初的状态就行了，让大家再次成为经营者。”[s11] 1965年，他首创“单位时间核算制度”作为管理会计指标——用销售额减去经费得出附加值，再除以总劳动时间，算出每小时创造的附加值，把“销售额最大化、经费最小化”这条经营原则变成了一张人人看得懂的核算表[s22]。以此为骨架，他把公司按工序、产品细分为一个个独立核算的小集团，下放经营计划、业绩管理和劳务管理的权限，并把全部经营业绩向成员公开。这种会随环境伸缩变形的小集体，被他命名为“阿米巴”——阿米巴经营由此诞生[s22][s42]。

第二件是多元化布局。1971年10月，京瓷股票在大阪证券交易所第二部和京都证券交易所上市，1972年9月转至东京证券交易所[s37]。上市之后，稻盛没有把钱押在单一产品上。1975年，京瓷与松下、夏普、美孚石油、泰科实验室等合资成立日本太阳能株式会社（JSEC），早早切入太阳电池开发[s23]；1979年至1982年间，Trident电子仪器、Cybernet通讯器材等公司相继并入京瓷集团，1982年公司更名为“京瓷株式会社”[s23]。此后京瓷又在1989年收购美国电子元件巨头AVX公司，将其纳入全球布局[s31]。陶瓷部件、半导体封装、太阳能电池、通信与办公设备，京瓷像滚雪球一样长出了一个多元化的技术集团，但每一块新业务都遵循同一条铁律：用独立核算看清真实的收支[s31][s14]。

1973年第一次石油危机是对这套体系最严酷的压力测试。订单骤降到高峰时的十分之一，稻盛公开承诺力保就业，同时决定削减管理人员工资、向工会提议暂停加薪；员工理解公司处境，齐心协力开拓销售、开发新产品[s22]。经济回暖后，京瓷先于同行恢复业绩，稻盛在下一年度把暂停的涨幅一并补足，还发放临时奖金回报员工[s22]。正是这种“玻璃般透明的经营”加上“绝不轻易裁人”的承诺，让京瓷在半个多世纪里保持了一个惊人的纪录：自上市以来从未出现过年度亏损[s9][s14]。创业第一年销售额2600万日元，到稻盛引退时京瓷年销售规模已达1.3万亿日元；六十年后的今天，京瓷集团年销售额超过2万亿日元，全球员工约7.3万人[s21][s37]。一家从仓库里走出来的陶瓷小厂，就这样被他做成了世界级企业。

IBM订单之所以成为京瓷发展史上的分水岭，不仅因为它的金额，更因为它重塑了京瓷的质量基因。IBM对基板的平整度、尺寸精度和批次一致性的要求，远超日本国内客户。初期京瓷送去的产品被大量判为不合格，IBM把印有瑕疵标记的退货原样送回，这对稻盛是巨大的刺激。他没有降低标准去迁就合格率，而是带着技术人员住到车间，逐道工序排查成型、脱脂、烧结的参数，连窑炉内的温度分布都反复测绘，直到良品率稳定达标[s3][s14]。这段经历让他形成了著名的“完美主义”：“产品的合格率不是99%，而是100%，因为1%的不合格品，对买到它的客户来说就是100%的失败。”[s14] 这种对完美的偏执，后来沉淀为京瓷哲学中“不断从事创造性的工作”和“追求完美主义”两条原则[s33]。

在扩张策略上，稻盛表现出工程师式的克制与远见。他坚持“不投机、不追逐浮财”，京瓷几乎不碰土地和股票的投机生意，而是把利润持续投回技术研发与相关多元化：从陶瓷绝缘部件到IC封装基板，从精密陶瓷到太阳能电池，从电子元件到通信设备、打印机、手机，每一步都围绕“材料—元件—整机”的能力链条自然延伸[s23][s31]。1979年到1982年间，他主导把经营通讯器材的Cybernet工业、经营电子仪器的Trident等公司并入集团，并在1982年统一更名为京瓷株式会社，让公司从单一陶瓷厂蜕变为综合性电子集团[s23]。1989年对美国AVX公司的收购，则是他“利他经营”在国际并购中的一次经典实践：谈判中他尊重对方股东的利益诉求，做出价格让步，换来了AVX管理层与员工的真心认同，使这次跨文化并购罕见地实现了长期双赢[s31]。

京瓷在用人和分配上同样别具一格。稻盛坚持“实力主义”：不论资排辈，让有能力的年轻人担任阿米巴长和工厂负责人；但他又坚决反对把员工的收入与短期绩效强挂钩的“绩效主义”，而是通过全员普调、临时奖金和精神荣誉来共享成果[s15]。1973年石油危机时订单骤降，他力保就业、暂停加薪、管理层先降工资，危机过后加倍补偿——这套做法让京瓷员工流失率长期远低于行业平均，也让“公司绝不抛弃员工、员工绝不背叛公司”的默契成为京瓷文化的基石[s22][s14]。到稻盛从经营一线引退时，京瓷已成长为销售规模约1.3万亿日元的跨国企业；他在盛和塾回顾时说，京瓷48年间从未亏损，紧随其后创建的KDDI也在二十多年间成长为销售超过3万亿日元的公司[s21]。一家从2600万日元年销售额起步的仓库小厂，靠陶瓷粉末、单位时间核算表和“敬天爱人”四个字，站上了世界电子产业的牌桌——这是战后日本制造逆袭的一个缩影，也是稻盛经营哲学第一次完整的自我证明。

**English:** The foundation on which Kyocera stood was precision ceramics. These new materials, formed by sintering high-purity inorganic powders at high temperature, possessed the insulating properties, heat resistance and wear resistance that metals could not offer, and they were precisely the key base materials of an age in which the electronics industry was taking off. Drawing on the technical skill Inamori had forged at Shofu Industries, the little twenty-eight-person plant stood from its very beginning at the hardest, most demanding link in the industrial chain.[s3][s22]

In the 1960s Kyocera met its first decisive international test. The American company IBM ordered alumina ceramic substrates for mainframe computers from suppliers around the world; the substrates were large, and the precision required was stringent almost to the limit, and Kyocera stood out among the several bidders to win the order. The products delivered at the outset failed inspection in large quantities and were returned stamped with the word "defective"; Inamori and his technicians ate and slept in the workshop, repeatedly improving the forming and sintering processes until they finally conquered the difficulty and achieved stable supply.[s3][s14] Winning the IBM order brought revenue, but far more importantly it won "Kyocera-made" goods the trust and endorsement of the global electronics industry - ceramic components that passed IBM's quality inspection amounted to a passport into the world market. Kyocera went on to supply ceramic multilayer substrates for IC packages to semiconductor makers such as Intel; the Kagoshima Sendai plant, completed in 1969, was dedicated to multilayer ceramic packages for integrated circuits; and in 1972 Kyocera received the 18th Okochi Memorial Production Special Prize for its "development of multilayer ceramic packages for large-scale integrated circuits."[s23][s37]

Beyond technology, Inamori made two far-reaching moves in this period. The first was organizational innovation. After the Shiga Gamo plant was built in 1963, Kyocera operated a two-plant system and its scale expanded rapidly, with the workforce already reaching roughly 150 by 1964.[s11][s22] Inamori acutely sensed a crisis: "Kyocera has grown fast on a flood of enthusiasm, but might it not quickly lose the zeal of the pioneer and degenerate into a company with no fighting spirit at all?"[s11] He missed the atmosphere of the earliest days, when a salesman would come running back to the shop floor shouting that an order had come in, and a single bowl of udon noodles bought during late-night overtime set the whole factory alight. The solution he offered was: "We need only return to the state of the founding, and let everyone become a manager once more."[s11] In 1965 he pioneered the "unit-time accounting system" as a management-accounting metric - taking value added as sales minus expenses, then dividing by total labor hours to compute the value added created per hour, thereby turning the management principle of "maximize sales, minimize expenses" into a single accounting sheet that anyone could understand.[s22] On that skeleton he subdivided the company, by process and by product, into small self-accounting groups, delegating to them the authority over business plans, performance management and labor management, and disclosing all operating results to their members. These small collectives that could stretch and reshape themselves with their environment he named "amoebas" - and amoeba management was born.[s22][s42]

The second move was diversification. In October 1971 Kyocera's shares were listed on the second section of the Osaka Stock Exchange and on the Kyoto Securities Exchange, and in September 1972 the listing moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.[s37] After going public, Inamori did not stake the company's money on a single product. In 1975 Kyocera joined with Matsushita, Sharp, Mobil Oil, Tyco Laboratories and others to establish Japan Solar Energy Corporation, JSEC, entering the development of solar cells at an early date;[s23] between 1979 and 1982 companies including Trident's electronic-instruments business and Cybernet's communications-equipment business successively merged into the Kyocera group, and in 1982 the company changed its name to Kyocera Corporation.[s23] Thereafter, in 1989, Kyocera acquired the American electronic-components giant AVX and brought it into its global layout.[s31] Ceramic components, semiconductor packages, solar cells, communications and office equipment - like a rolling snowball Kyocera grew into a diversified technology group, yet every new block of business followed the same iron law: use self-accounting to see the true income and outgo.[s31][s14]

The first oil crisis of 1973 was the harshest stress test this system ever faced. Orders plunged to a tenth of their peak; Inamori publicly pledged to protect employment, while deciding to cut managers' salaries and proposing to the union that pay raises be suspended; the employees understood the company's plight and joined forces to open up sales and develop new products.[s22] Once the economy warmed again, Kyocera recovered its performance ahead of its rivals, and in the following fiscal year Inamori made up the suspended raises in full and paid out special bonuses to repay his employees.[s22] It is precisely this "glass-clear management," combined with the promise never to lay workers off lightly, that has allowed Kyocera to maintain an astonishing record for more than half a century: never an annual loss since going public.[s9][s14] From sales of 26 million yen in its first year, Kyocera's annual sales had reached some 1.3 trillion yen by the time Inamori withdrew from front-line management; sixty years on, the Kyocera group's annual sales exceed 2 trillion yen, with roughly 73,000 employees worldwide.[s21][s37] A small ceramics shop that walked out of a warehouse had been made, by his hand, into a world-class enterprise.

The IBM order became a watershed in Kyocera's history not only because of its value but because it refashioned Kyocera's quality DNA. IBM's requirements for the flatness of the substrates, their dimensional precision and the consistency of batches went far beyond those of Kyocera's domestic customers. The first products sent in were judged defective in large numbers, and IBM sent the returns back stamped with their defect marks as they were - a tremendous jolt to Inamori. Rather than lower the standard to accommodate the yield rate, he moved his technicians into the workshop and traced the parameters of forming, debinding and sintering process by process, even repeatedly mapping the temperature distribution inside the kiln, until the good-product rate stably met the mark.[s3][s14] The experience formed his famous perfectionism: "The yield rate of a product is not 99 percent but 100 percent, because a single percent of defective goods means 100 percent failure for the customer who happens to buy it."[s14] That obsession with perfection later settled into two principles of Kyocera philosophy: "engage in creative work constantly" and "pursue perfectionism."[s33]

In his expansion strategy Inamori displayed an engineer's restraint and foresight. He insisted on "no speculation and no chasing of windfall profits"; Kyocera barely touched speculative dealings in land or shares, and instead plowed its profits continuously back into technological research and related diversification: from ceramic insulating parts to IC package substrates, from precision ceramics to solar cells, from electronic components to communications equipment, printers and mobile phones, each step extended naturally along the capability chain of "materials, components, finished machines."[s23][s31] Between 1979 and 1982 he led the merger into the group of Cybernet Industrial, which made communications equipment, and Trident, which made electronic instruments, and in 1982 the company was unified under the name Kyocera Corporation, transforming itself from a single ceramics plant into a comprehensive electronics group.[s23] The 1989 acquisition of the American company AVX was a classic exercise of his "altruistic management" in cross-border mergers: during the negotiations he respected the interests of the other side's shareholders and made concessions on price, in exchange for the genuine acceptance of AVX's management and employees, with the rare result that this cross-cultural acquisition achieved a long-term win for both sides.[s31]

Kyocera was equally distinctive in its use of people and its distribution of rewards. Inamori insisted on meritocracy: no seniority-based ranking, with capable young people made heads of amoebas and managers of plants; yet he firmly opposed the "performance-ism" that ties employees' incomes forcefully to short-term results, preferring to share the fruits through across-the-board raises, special bonuses and spiritual honors.[s15] When orders collapsed during the oil crisis of 1973, he protected employment, suspended raises and cut management pay first, then doubly compensated everyone once the crisis passed - a set of practices that kept Kyocera's employee turnover far below the industry average for decades and made the tacit understanding that "the company never abandons its employees, and its employees never betray the company" into the cornerstone of Kyocera's culture.[s22][s14] By the time Inamori withdrew from the front line of management, Kyocera had grown into a multinational enterprise with sales on the order of 1.3 trillion yen; looking back at Seiwajuku, he said that Kyocera had never posted a loss in forty-eight years, and that KDDI, founded immediately after, had likewise grown in little more than twenty years into a company with sales of more than 3 trillion yen.[s21] A warehouse workshop that began with annual sales of 26 million yen took its seat at the table of the world electronics industry on the strength of ceramic powder, the unit-time accounting sheet and the four characters "revere the divine and love people" - a microcosm of the postwar comeback of Japanese manufacturing, and the first complete self-validation of Inamori's management philosophy.

### 4. 第二次创业：动机至善，私心了无——DDI到KDDI / The Second Founding: Wholly Good Motive, Self-interest Erased - from DDI to KDDI

1984年，52岁的稻盛和夫做出了一个让所有人意外的决定：再次创业，进入与陶瓷毫无关系的电信行业[s3]。背景是日本政府这一年启动电信自由化改革，打破日本电信电话公社（NTT）对长途电话市场的长期垄断。但NTT是年营收超过十万亿日元的巨型国企，体量是京瓷的数十倍，新进入者要自建长途线路、与巨象正面竞争，风险之大令日本大企业无人敢动[s11]。

稻盛站了出来。他后来坦言，自己当时是以“堂·吉诃德”的心态迎接这场蚂蚁与巨象之战的：“既然如此，就让我来试试吧！”[s11] 但在正式入局之前，他经历了一段近乎苛刻的自我拷问。每晚临睡之前，哪怕喝了酒，他都要反复自问自答：“你参与通信事业，真的是为了国民利益吗？没有夹杂为公司、为个人的私心吗？你的动机真的纯粹吗？没有一丝杂念吗？”[s11] 这样的自问自答持续了半年，直到他确认自己“动机至善、私心了无”，才正式动手创立第二电电企画株式会社（DDI），并就任会长[s3][s41]。

1984年6月，DDI与另外两家新公司一同进入电信市场。舆论普遍认为，三家新公司里DDI条件最差——没有通信技术积累，没有销售网络，一切从零开始[s11]。稻盛的对策有两条。一条是精神上的：他把创业目的明确定义为“为国民降低通信费用”，要求员工怀抱大义名分去打拼；另一条是制度上的：他把京瓷验证过的阿米巴经营和哲学共有整套搬进DDI，让这支通信行业的新军从第一天起就用独立核算算账、用共同价值观凝聚人[s13][s14]。他还坚持一个极其特殊的安排：DDI上市后，作为创始经营者的他个人一股都不持有。他的逻辑是，哪怕持有一股，都无法向国民证明自己“毫无私心”；资本收益应当回报给拼命工作的员工[s11]。

结果出乎舆论预料：在三家新进入者中，条件最差的DDI业绩反而最好，很快脱颖而出，成长为日本电信市场仅次于NTT的第二股力量[s3][s11]。稻盛把原因归结为信念的力量：“为国民尽力、毫无私心”的企业，员工士气最高，客户最终也会用选择投票[s11]。2000年10月，在稻盛主导下，DDI与KDD（国际电报电话）、IDO（日本移动通信）三家合并，成立株式会社DDI，2001年更名为KDDI株式会社，稻盛出任董事名誉会长，2001年6月起担任最高顾问[s3][s10]。KDDI此后稳居日本第二大综合电信运营商，与京瓷先后跻身《财富》世界500强[s10][s14]。

一个人亲手创办两家世界500强，这在当时的全球商业史上没有先例[s3]。更耐人寻味的是他两次创业的共同点：都进入了自己并不熟悉的领域（陶瓷之外是通信，通信之外后来还有航空），都面对体量远超自己的巨头，而他赖以取胜的都不是资源禀赋，而是被他称为“思维方式”的东西。他后来把这个逻辑提炼成著名的“成功方程式”：人生和工作的结果＝思维方式×热情×能力。能力和热情的分数从0到100，而思维方式的取值是从负100到正100——一个能力强、热情高的人，如果思维方式是负的（自私、邪恶、怠惰），结果反而是更大的负值[s14][s41]。创办DDI前那半年的“动机拷问”，本质上就是在确保这个乘法里最关键的乘数为正。对稻盛和夫而言，“动机至善、私心了无”不是道德修辞，而是事业能否长久的数学前提。

同样在1984年，稻盛做了另一件与赚钱无关的大事：投入个人财产设立公益财团法人稻盛财团，并于1985年创设国际奖项“京都奖”，每年表彰在尖端技术、基础科学、思想与艺术领域为人类进步作出卓越贡献的人[s3][s25]。他为京都奖捐赠了200亿日元现金和京瓷股票，奖项被誉为“日本的诺贝尔奖”，2018年起单个奖项奖金提高至1亿日元，与诺奖比肩[s25][s26][s45]；稻盛财团官方小史记载，设奖前他还曾向诺贝尔基金会表达敬意[s51][s49]。一个把“利他”挂在嘴边的经营者，用真金白银把自己的信条制度化了。

DDI的崛起过程中，还有一个常被忽略却极具稻盛色彩的细节：线路选址。长途电话竞争需要铺设大容量通信线路，在日本列岛的崇山峻岭间架设微波或光缆，投入巨大且选址直接决定成本。稻盛把这件“苦活”交给了一支平均年龄不到30岁的年轻队伍，他们顶着“条件最差”的外部判断，翻山越岭勘测、谈判、施工，硬是从零建起了覆盖全国的通信网络[s11][s13]。这支队伍后来被称为“DDI的特攻队”。稻盛给他们的不是优厚待遇，而是一种“为国民降低话费”的大义——正是这种超越利润的使命感，让年轻人愿意以命相搏[s11]。DDI的长途话费在竞争压力下大幅下降，普通日本家庭的电话负担显著减轻，这正是稻盛入局时反复申明的“国民利益”[s10]。

在公司治理上，稻盛同样把“无私”做到了极致。DDI创业团队中，他作为最大功臣却刻意不持股，理由是“哪怕持有一股，都无法证明自己毫无私心”；股票上市的资本收益，他主张回报给承担风险、拼命工作的员工[s11]。这种安排在全球创业史上都属罕见——它把“利他”从口号变成了股权结构。稻盛后来总结领导力时反复强调：“无私是第一领导力。”一个挟带私心的领导者，或许能取得一时成功，但无法在需要所有人长期托付的事业中走得远[s13][s41]。2000年DDI、KDD、IDO三家合并为KDDI时，稻盛再次以促成合并、成就大局为先，主动淡化个人权位，仅任名誉会长、最高顾问，把经营舞台让给后继者[s3][s10]。

京都奖的设立，则让世人看到了这位“第二次创业者”的另一面。1984年，稻盛投入私人财产设立稻盛财团，翌年创设京都奖，分尖端技术、基础科学、思想与艺术三个领域，每年表彰为人类社会进步作出卓越贡献的人士[s3][s25]。他在设立宗旨中写道：“为人类、为社会做出贡献，乃人之最崇高之行为。”[s25] 他为财团捐赠了约200亿日元现金及京瓷股票，使京都奖的奖金足以比肩诺贝尔奖；该奖被国际社会视为“日本的诺贝尔奖”，尤其奖励那些诺贝尔奖不覆盖的数学、信息科学与艺术思想领域的成就[s25][s26]。白南准、三宅一生、皮娜·鲍什等各领域大师都曾是获奖者[s26]。

到1997年决定引退时，稻盛和夫已经完成了常人几辈子都难以企及的事功：两家世界500强、一个国际大奖、一套自成体系的经营哲学。但他对自己人生的规划，却在此时转向了一个完全不同的方向——他要为“灵魂的起程”做准备。这个把“动机至善、私心了无”从创办DDI前的自我拷问，贯彻到不持一股、捐出200亿、65岁出家的人，用行动回答了那个他在书里反复提出的问题：人活着，究竟是为了什么？他的答案是：为了在离开时，灵魂比到来时更纯净一点[s8][s40]。

**English:** In 1984, at fifty-two, Kazuo Inamori made a decision that astonished everyone: he would start a company once again, entering the telecommunications industry, which had nothing whatever to do with ceramics.[s3] The background was that the Japanese government launched the liberalization of telecommunications that year, breaking the long monopoly of long-distance telephony held by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, NTT. But NTT was a giant state enterprise with annual revenue of more than 10 trillion yen, dozens of times Kyocera's size; a newcomer would have to build its own long-distance lines and fight the elephant head on, and the risk was so great that none of Japan's large corporations dared to move.[s11]

Inamori stepped forward. He later admitted that he had entered this battle of an ant against an elephant in the spirit of Don Quixote: "In that case, let me give it a try!"[s11] Yet before formally entering the fray he subjected himself to a stretch of almost harsh self-questioning. Every night before sleep, even when he had been drinking, he would put questions to himself and answer them again and again: "Are you truly entering the telecommunications business for the sake of the nation's people? Is no selfishness mixed in, for the sake of your company or of yourself? Is your motive truly pure? Is there not a single stray thought?"[s11] This nightly cross-examination continued for half a year, and only once he had confirmed that his motive was "wholly good and self-interest utterly erased" did he formally move to found Daini-Denden Planning Co., Ltd., known as DDI, and take office as its chairman.[s3][s41]

In June 1984 DDI entered the telecommunications market together with two other new companies. Public opinion all but agreed that among the three newcomers DDI was in the worst shape: it had no accumulated telecommunications technology, no sales network, and was starting everything from zero.[s11] Inamori's response had two parts. One was spiritual: he defined the purpose of the venture outright as "lowering telephone charges for the nation's people" and demanded that employees fight under the banner of a noble cause. The other was institutional: he transplanted into DDI in their entirety the amoeba management and shared philosophy proven at Kyocera, so that this telecommunications newcomer ran its accounts on self-accounting units and bound its people together with shared values from its very first day.[s13][s14] He also insisted on one extraordinarily unusual arrangement: after DDI went public, he, as the founding manager, would hold not a single share in his own name. His logic was that holding even one share would make it impossible to prove to the nation that he was "without a trace of selfishness"; the capital gains should instead be returned to the employees who worked themselves to the bone.[s11]

The result ran against all public expectation: of the three new entrants, DDI, with the worst starting conditions, turned in the best performance, quickly pulling ahead to grow into the second force in the Japanese telecommunications market after NTT.[s3][s11] Inamori attributed the outcome to the power of conviction: in a company that "exerted itself for the nation's people, utterly without selfishness," employee morale was at its highest, and in the end the customers too would vote with their choices.[s11] In October 2000, under Inamori's leadership, DDI merged with KDD, Kokusai Denshin Denwa in international telecommunications, and IDO, Nippon Idou Tsushin in mobile communications, to form DDI Corporation, renamed KDDI Corporation in 2001; Inamori became chairman emeritus and, from June 2001, honorary adviser.[s3][s10] KDDI has since held firm as Japan's second-largest integrated telecom carrier, and together with Kyocera successively entered the Fortune Global 500.[s10][s14]

That one man personally founded two Fortune Global 500 companies had no precedent, at the time, in the entire history of global business.[s3] What is even more telling is the common thread between his two ventures: in each case he entered a field he did not know - telecommunications beyond ceramics, and later aviation beyond telecommunications; in each case he faced a giant far larger than himself; and in each case what won the day for him was not resource endowments but the thing he called "mindset," the way of thinking. He later distilled that logic into the famous success equation: the results of life and work equal mindset multiplied by passion multiplied by ability. Ability and passion are scored from 0 to 100, whereas mindset runs from minus 100 to plus 100 - a person of great ability and high passion, if his mindset is negative (selfish, evil, indolent), produces a still larger negative result.[s14][s41] The half-year "inquisition of motive" before founding DDI was, in essence, an effort to make certain that the most critical multiplier in this equation was positive. For Kazuo Inamori, "a wholly good motive and utterly erased self-interest" was no moral rhetoric but the mathematical precondition for whether an enterprise could endure.

In that same year of 1984, Inamori did another great thing that had nothing to do with making money: he invested his personal assets to establish the Inamori Foundation, a public-interest incorporated foundation, and in 1985 created the international Kyoto Prize, honoring each year those who have made outstanding contributions to human progress in advanced technology, the basic sciences, and thought and the arts.[s3][s25] He donated 20 billion yen in cash together with Kyocera shares to the Kyoto Prize, which has been praised as "Japan's Nobel Prize"; from 2018 the purse for each prize was raised to 100 million yen, on a par with the Nobel itself.[s25][s26][s45] The official short history of the Inamori Foundation records that before establishing the award he also expressed his respect to the Nobel Foundation.[s51][s49] A manager who forever had "altruism" on his lips had institutionalized his own creed with hard cash.

In DDI's rise there is one often-overlooked detail that is thoroughly Inamori-esque: the routing of the lines. Competing in long-distance telephony meant laying high-capacity communications circuits, and stringing microwave links or optical cable across the steep mountains and deep valleys of the Japanese archipelago demanded enormous investment, with the choice of route directly determining cost. Inamori entrusted this "grueling work" to a young team with an average age under thirty; braving the outside verdict that they were the worst-positioned of the entrants, they surveyed, negotiated and built over mountains and across ranges, and from nothing raised a communications network covering the whole country.[s11][s13] The team later became known as the "DDI special attack corps." What Inamori gave them was not generous treatment but a noble cause - "lowering telephone charges for the nation's people" - and it was precisely this sense of mission that rose above profit which made young people willing to fight for it as though their lives were on the line.[s11] Under the pressure of competition, DDI's long-distance rates fell sharply and the telephone burden on ordinary Japanese households was significantly lightened - exactly the "national interest" Inamori had invoked again and again when entering the market.[s10]

In corporate governance Inamori likewise pushed "selflessness" to its limit. Among DDI's founding team, he was the greatest contributor by far, yet he deliberately held no shares, on the grounds that "holding even one share would make it impossible to prove I was without a trace of selfishness"; of the capital gains when the stock went public, he argued that they should be returned to the employees who had borne the risk and worked themselves to the bone.[s11] An arrangement this rare in the entire history of startups worldwide turns altruism from a slogan into a shareholding structure. When later summing up leadership, Inamori stressed again and again: "Selflessness is the first qualification of leadership." A leader carrying private baggage may enjoy temporary success, but he cannot go far in an enterprise that demands the long-term trust of everyone.[s13][s41] When DDI, KDD and IDO merged into KDDI in 2000, Inamori once again put the achievement of the merger and the good of the whole first, deliberately downplaying his own position to serve only as chairman emeritus and honorary adviser, and handing the stage of management to his successors.[s3][s10]

The founding of the Kyoto Prize showed the world another face of this "second-time founder." In 1984 he invested his private assets to establish the Inamori Foundation, and the following year created the Kyoto Prize in three fields - advanced technology, basic sciences, and thought and the arts - each year honoring those who have made outstanding contributions to the progress of human society.[s3][s25] In the charter of the prize he wrote: "To contribute to humankind and to society is the noblest of human acts."[s25] He donated to the foundation some 20 billion yen in cash together with Kyocera shares, so that the Kyoto Prize's purse could stand comparison with the Nobel; the prize is regarded by the international community as "Japan's Nobel Prize," rewarding in particular achievements in mathematics, information science, and artistic and philosophical fields that the Nobel does not cover.[s25][s26] Masters of their fields including Nam June Paik, Issey Miyake and Pina Bausch have been among the laureates.[s26]

By the time he decided to step down in 1997, Kazuo Inamori had accomplished deeds that ordinary people could hardly reach in several lifetimes: two Fortune Global 500 companies, an international prize, and a self-contained management philosophy. Yet his plan for his own life was at this very moment turning in a completely different direction - he would prepare for "the soul's departure." The man who had carried "a wholly good motive and utterly erased self-interest" from his self-interrogation before founding DDI, through holding not a single share, donating 20 billion yen and taking monastic vows at sixty-five, answered through his actions the question he posed again and again in his books: for what, after all, does a person live? His answer was: so that at the moment of departure, the soul is a little purer than it was at arrival.[s8][s40]

### 5. 哲学的制度化：阿米巴经营、会计七原则与经营十二条 / Institutionalizing Philosophy: Amoeba Management, the Seven Principles of Accounting and the Twelve Management Principles

稻盛和夫常说，经营企业需要两个轮子：一个是“术”的轮子，即让每个人看清经营数字的管理会计体系；一个是“心”的轮子，即全员共有的经营哲学[s22][s42]。两者缺一，企业要么沦为精于算计而人心涣散的赚钱机器，要么变成充满温情却算不清账的乌合之众。他用三十年时间，把这两个轮子在京瓷打磨成了一套可复制的制度。

先说“术”。阿米巴经营的核心，是把庞大的组织细分成一个个名为“阿米巴”的最小核算单位——通常五到十人，对应一道工序、一条产品线或一个服务环节[s22][s33]。每个阿米巴就是一个“微型企业”：它的负责人（阿米巴长）像老板一样自主制定计划、调配人手、控制成本、追求利润；单位的收支通过“单位时间核算表”呈现，用附加值除以总劳动时间得出“每小时创造的价值”，让经营好坏一目了然[s22]。更关键的是，全部经营数字向阿米巴全体成员公开——这就是稻盛反复强调的“玻璃般透明的经营”：员工知道自己这个单元今天赚了还是亏了，知道公司整体处于什么状态，于是不再被动执行命令，而是主动思考“如何提高本部门的销售额、如何削减经费”[s33][s42]。在他看来，大企业病的根源是“经营变成了少数干部的事”，而阿米巴要解决的正是这个问题：让每一位员工都成为经营的主角，实现“全员参与经营”[s31][s33]。1991年，哈佛商学院教授约翰·科特曾撰文分析，稻盛的独特之处在于用个人领导力与企业文化，在保持阿米巴作为利润中心自主性的同时，消弭了小单元之间潜在的利益冲突[s14]。

与阿米巴配套的是“京瓷会计学”，即著名的会计七原则：一一对应原则、双重确认原则、完美主义原则、肌肉型经营原则、提高核算原则、玻璃般透明经营原则、现金本位经营原则[s14][s33]。这些原则的共同指向，是拒绝一切模糊与粉饰：货物与票据必须一一对应，不让任何数字游离于监督之外；不背多余的包袱，让企业像肌肉紧实的运动员一样没有赘肉；以现金流转而非账面利润来把握经营实体。稻盛是工程师出身，他把财务报表当成“企业的体检表”来读，坚持经营者必须亲自看懂数字背后的现场事实[s33][s42]。日航重建时他震惊地发现，这家公司的干部“对经营数值满不在乎”，甚至连每条航线是否赚钱都算不清楚——而这正是他后来用阿米巴式核算对症下药的地方[s7]。

再说“心”。稻盛认为，机制再精密，也需要正确的人来运转，否则核算表会变成部门间争利的武器。因此他在京瓷推行彻底的“哲学共有”：通过晨会、学习会、手册与反复讲述，让全体员工共享同一套判断基准[s22][s42]。这套哲学的基石，是他提出的经营与人生的根本判断标准——“作为人，何谓正确”。他解释说，这个基准“不是对京瓷来讲有什么好处，更不是对我个人来讲有什么好处”，而是超越单个企业和个人的利害得失，以做人最基本的道德——正直、不骗人、不贪婪、不撒谎——作为一切经营决策的原点[s33][s14]。他把西乡隆盛“敬天爱人”的座右铭挂在京瓷总部，“敬天”是敬畏天道、顺应自然规律与道德律令，“爱人”是以利他之心关爱员工、客户与社会[s30][s41]。

在此基础上，他为经营者提炼出两套行动纲领。一套是“经营十二条”：明确事业的目的与意义；设立具体目标；胸中怀有强烈愿望；付出不亚于任何人的努力；追求销售最大化和经费最小化；定价即经营；经营取决于坚强的意志；燃烧的斗魂；拿出勇气做事；不断从事创造性的工作；以关爱和诚实之心待人；保持乐观向上的态度[s14][s33]。另一套是面向所有人日常修身的“六项精进”：付出不亚于任何人的努力；要谦虚，不要骄傲；要每天反省；活着，就要感谢；积善行，思利他；不要有感性的烦恼[s14][s40]。前三条讲如何对事，后三条讲如何对心。他还给出一套独特的工作方法论——“乐观地设想，悲观地计划，愉快地执行”：构思阶段要大胆乐观，相信梦想；计划阶段要设想一切风险、周密谨慎；执行阶段则要满怀信心、乐观推进[s14]。

值得注意的是，稻盛的制度设计刻意排斥纯粹的金钱刺激。在与张瑞敏的对话中，他明确批评欧美的“绩效主义”：按业绩计件发钱，景气时能刺激人，一旦销售额下降，高收入者收入骤降反而成为不满分子，整个公司气氛都会变坏[s15]。在阿米巴中，单位时间效益高的单元得到的是全公司的赞赏、尊敬与感谢——“只限于名誉上的褒奖，而不用金钱来刺激”；公司整体效益好时，则给全体人员普调收入，让大家共享果实[s15]。这种设计的目标，是促成员工之间互帮互助、同甘共苦，而不是内部恶性竞争。它深深植根于日本式的长期雇佣与集体主义土壤，也因此在跨文化移植时必然面临变形——这一点，连稻盛本人和张瑞敏都看得很清楚[s29][s15]。制度可以学，哲学背后的人心，才是最难复制的部分。

理解阿米巴经营，还需要理解它刻意处理的一对张力：放权与协同。一方面，阿米巴长被赋予近乎社长的经营权限，要对本单元的收支负责，这极大激发了一线的自主性与人才成长——稻盛把它称为快速培养经营人才的“道场”，无数20多岁、30岁出头的年轻人在阿米巴长的位置上学会了算账、定价、带人、决策[s22][s33]。另一方面，若各单元只追求自身核算最优，就会滋生部门本位、互相抬价、拒绝协作。稻盛的解法不是靠行政命令，而是靠哲学共有：他反复要求所有阿米巴在经营中遵循“做人何谓正确”和“利他”准则，单元之间的内部交易定价要由双方本着“让客户满意、让整体最优”协商确定，任何损人利己的做法都被视为对经营哲学的背叛[s33][s42]。也正因如此，他反复申明：阿米巴经营绝不只是一套核算工具，它必须建立在京瓷哲学的地基上；没有哲学共有，阿米巴就会退化为内部博弈的战场[s7][s15]。日航重建时，他同时导入《日航哲学》与阿米巴核算，正是“心”与“术”双轮驱动的完整复刻[s7]。

经营十二条则是稻盛留给经营者的一张“行动清单”，其中贯穿着他对经营本质的独特理解。比如“定价即经营”：他认为没有哪一个决策像定价那样深刻决定企业生死——价格定在客户愿意支付的最高点，同时倒逼内部把成本做到极致，这正是“销售最大化、经费最小化”的交汇点[s33][s14]。比如“销售最大化、经费最小化”这一条，他说利润无须强求，只要量入为出、把这两头做到极致，利润“随之而来”[s14]。再比如“燃烧的斗魂”与“拿出勇气”：他认为经营者必须具备保护员工、捍卫正确的斗魂，不能做和稀泥的“老好人”——“企业家如果缺乏直面冲突的勇气，只会一味讨好员工，势必导致整个公司陷入不幸”[s14][s33]。这些条款没有一条是玄虚的，全部可以落实到第二天的管理动作上；但它们合在一起，指向的却是同一个要求：经营者必须先成为一个人格高尚、意志坚定、动机纯粹的人。在稻盛的体系里，经营的终点从来不是财富，而是经营者与全体员工人格的共同提升[s40][s42]。

**English:** Kazuo Inamori used to say that running a business requires two wheels: the wheel of "technique," the management-accounting system that lets every person see the numbers of the business clearly, and the wheel of "the heart," the management philosophy shared by every member of the organization.[s22][s42] With either wheel missing, a company degenerates either into a profit-making machine sharp at calculation but fractured in morale, or into a warm-hearted rabble that cannot keep its accounts straight. Over thirty years he ground these two wheels at Kyocera into a reproducible set of institutions.

Begin with "technique." The core of amoeba management is to subdivide the large organization into the smallest possible accounting units, each named an "amoeba" - usually five to ten people, corresponding to a single process, a single product line or a single service link.[s22][s33] Every amoeba is a "miniature company": its leader, the amoeba chief, draws up plans, deploys people, controls costs and pursues profit like an owner; the unit's income and outgo are displayed on the "unit-time accounting sheet," which divides value added by total labor hours to produce "the value created per hour," so that the quality of management can be seen at a glance.[s22] More crucially, every operating number is disclosed to all members of the amoeba - this is the "glass-clear, transparent management" Inamori stressed again and again: employees know whether their unit made or lost money today, and they know what condition the company as a whole is in, so that they cease to be passive executors of orders and instead think for themselves about how to raise their department's sales and cut its expenses.[s33][s42] In his view, the root of large-company disease is that "management has become the affair of a handful of executives," and amoeba management addresses precisely that problem: making every employee a protagonist of management, achieving "all-member participation in management."[s31][s33] In 1991 John Kotter, the Harvard Business School professor, wrote that Inamori's distinctiveness lay in using personal leadership power and corporate culture to preserve the autonomy of amoebas as profit centers while dissolving the potential conflicts of interest between small units.[s14]

Paired with the amoebas stands "Kyocera accounting," the famous Seven Principles of Accounting: the principle of one-to-one correspondence; the principle of double checking; the principle of perfectionism; the principle of muscular management; the principle of profitability enhancement; the principle of glass-clear, transparent management; and the principle of cash-based management.[s14][s33] These principles all point in one direction: the rejection of all ambiguity and window-dressing. Goods and slips must correspond one-to-one, with no number allowed to drift beyond oversight; the firm carries no superfluous baggage, standing like a lean-muscled athlete without an ounce of flab; and the substance of the business is grasped through cash flow rather than book profits. An engineer by training, Inamori read financial statements as "the medical checkup sheet of the enterprise" and insisted that managers must personally understand the shop-floor facts that lay behind the numbers.[s33][s42] During the Japan Airlines reconstruction he was shocked to discover that the company's executives were "utterly careless about management figures" and could not even work out whether each route was making money - exactly the ailment he later treated with amoeba-style accounting.[s7]

Now the wheel of "the heart." Inamori held that no mechanism, however precise, could run without the right people, or the accounting sheets would become weapons in a war of departmental advantage. He therefore practiced a thoroughgoing "shared philosophy" at Kyocera: through morning meetings, study sessions, handbooks and endless repetition, every employee came to share the same set of judgment criteria.[s22][s42] The cornerstone of that philosophy was his fundamental standard of judgment in management and in life - "what is right as a human being." This criterion, he explained, "is not what benefits Kyocera, and still less what benefits me personally"; it rises above the gains and losses of any single company or individual, taking the most basic morality of being a person - uprightness, not deceiving others, not being greedy, not lying - as the origin of every management decision.[s33][s14] He hung Saigo Takamori's motto, "revere the divine and love people" (keiten aijin), in Kyocera's headquarters: "reverence for the divine" means standing in awe of the way of heaven and conforming to natural law and moral imperative, while "love for people" means caring for employees, customers and society with an altruistic heart.[s30][s41]

On this foundation he distilled two sets of action guidelines for managers. One is the Twelve Management Principles: clearly set forth the purpose and significance of the business; set concrete goals; hold a strong desire in your breast; exert an effort second to none; pursue maximum sales and minimum expenses; pricing is management; management depends on strong will; a burning fighting spirit; take action with courage; engage in creative work constantly; treat people with a caring and sincere heart; and always maintain an optimistic, upbeat attitude.[s14][s33] The other, aimed at everyone's daily self-cultivation, is the Six Disciplines: exert an effort second to none; be humble and not proud; reflect every day; be grateful while you are alive; accumulate good deeds and keep the altruistic heart in mind; and do not dwell in emotional worry.[s14][s40] The first three concern how to handle matters, the latter three how to tend the mind. He also offered a distinctive working method - "be optimistic in conceiving, pessimistic in planning, and joyful in executing": at the stage of conception be bold and optimistic and believe in the dream; at the stage of planning imagine every risk with exhaustive care; and at the stage of execution press forward brimming with confidence and good cheer.[s14]

It is worth noting that Inamori's institutional design deliberately excluded purely monetary incentives. In dialogue with Zhang Ruimin he explicitly criticized the Western "performance-ism": paying by the piece according to results can spur people in boom times, but once sales fall, the high earners whose incomes suddenly drop become the discontented instead, and the atmosphere of the entire company turns sour.[s15] Inside the amoebas, what the units with high value-added-per-hour receive is company-wide admiration, respect and gratitude - "praise limited to honor, with no monetary stimulus"; when the company as a whole does well, everyone receives an across-the-board raise, so that all share the fruit.[s15] The aim of this design is to foster mutual help and the sharing of bitter and sweet among employees, rather than vicious internal competition. It is deeply rooted in the Japanese soil of long-term employment and collectivism, and for that reason it is bound to undergo transformation when transplanted across cultures - a point that both Inamori himself and Zhang Ruimin saw with perfect clarity.[s29][s15] Institutions can be learned; the human heart behind the philosophy is the part that is hardest of all to copy.

To understand amoeba management one must also understand the tension it deliberately handles: delegation versus coordination. On one hand, the amoeba chief is granted managerial authority close to that of a company president and is held responsible for his unit's income and outgo, which powerfully stimulates front-line autonomy and the growth of talent - Inamori called it a "dojo," a training hall, for rapidly cultivating management talent, and countless people in their late twenties and early thirties learned on the amoeba-chief's perch how to keep accounts, set prices, lead people and take decisions.[s22][s33] On the other hand, if each unit pursues only the optimum of its own accounts, departmental parochialism, mutual price-gouging and refusal to cooperate will breed. Inamori's solution was not administrative command but shared philosophy: he required again and again that every amoeba follow the criteria of "what is right as a human being" and of altruism in its operations, that the pricing of internal transactions between units be settled through negotiation between the two sides in the spirit of "satisfying the customer and optimizing the whole," and that any practice of benefiting oneself at another's expense be regarded as a betrayal of the management philosophy.[s33][s42] It is for precisely this reason that he insisted again and again: amoeba management is never merely an accounting tool; it must be built on the foundation of Kyocera philosophy; without shared philosophy, amoebas degenerate into a battlefield of internal gaming.[s7][s15] During the Japan Airlines reconstruction he imported both the JAL Philosophy and amoeba accounting at once - the complete replica of the two wheels of heart and technique driving together.[s7]

The Twelve Management Principles, for their part, are the "action checklist" Inamori left to managers, threaded through with his distinctive understanding of the essence of management. Take "pricing is management": he believed that no decision determines the life and death of an enterprise as profoundly as pricing - setting the price at the highest point the customer is willing to pay, while forcing the interior to drive costs to their utmost, is precisely the intersection of "maximum sales and minimum expenses."[s33][s14] Take that principle of "maximum sales, minimum expenses" itself: profit, he said, need not be forced; if you cut your coat according to your cloth and push these two ends to their extremes, profit "follows of itself."[s14] Or take "the burning fighting spirit" and "take action with courage": a manager must possess the fighting spirit to protect his employees and defend what is right, and cannot be a conflict-averse people-pleaser - "if the entrepreneur lacks the courage to face conflict head-on and seeks only to flatter his employees, he will inevitably plunge the entire company into misfortune."[s14][s33] Not one of these precepts is mystical; every one can be carried out in the very next day's management actions. Yet taken together they all point toward one and the same requirement: the manager must first become a person of noble character, firm will and pure motive. In Inamori's system, the endpoint of management was never wealth but the joint elevation of the character of the manager and of all the employees.[s40][s42]

### 6. 78岁的出征：日本航空重建与哲学的胜利 / The Seventy-Eight-Year-Old Marches Out: The Reconstruction of Japan Airlines and the Victory of Philosophy

2010年1月19日，日本航空公司（JAL）依据《会社更生法》向东京地方法院申请破产保护，负债总额高达2.32万亿日元（约合255亿美元），是日本战后最大的非金融企业破产案之一，股票于2月20日从东京证券交易所摘牌[s31][s32][s44]。这家曾是日本最大、世界第三的航空公司，长期背负国企式的高成本体质、复杂的工会对立和臃肿的航线网络，在全球金融危机冲击下轰然倒地，被媒体称为“日本经济衰退的象征”[s11][s7]。

日本政府的企业再生支援机构决定出手重组，并需要一位德高望重的经营者挂帅。时任首相鸠山由纪夫想到了已经78岁、出家修行十余年的稻盛和夫[s11]。周围几乎所有人都强烈反对：他早已退居二线，不懂航空业，年事已高，而且日航是出了名的“重建不可能”——媒体普遍预言它必定二次破产[s7][s22]。稻盛自己再三坚辞，但最终出于三项“大义”接受了邀请：一是重建日航可以防止其二次破产冲击日本经济、让国民重拾信心；二是必须保住留在公司的员工的饭碗；三是维持航空业的公平竞争环境，为国民提供价格合理、优质的服务[s7][s13]。2010年2月，他正式就任日航会长，并宣布因年事已高、无法百分之百投入，故不领取任何报酬——零薪酬出征[s1][s13]。

上任后，稻盛发现的问题比预想更严重：干部员工对公司倒闭缺乏危机感和责任感，总部与现场完全脱节，整家公司一盘散沙；更致命的是，经营干部几乎没有“领导人”的自我意识，对收支核算满不在乎[s7]。他的重建不是从裁员和砍航线开始的，而是从“人心”开始的。上任之初他就宣布：“新生日航的经营目的不是别的，就是追求全体员工物质和精神两方面的幸福。”——把他在京瓷和KDDI奉行的理念，原封不动搬进这家垂死的国企[s13]。2010年6月起，他召集约50名经营干部，以“作为人，同时作为一个团队的领导人，应该怎么做”为主题，分17次进行集中培训[s7]。他还亲自前往羽田、成田等主要机场，把飞行员、乘务员、维修人员、地勤召集起来，一遍遍讲述：航空业归根结底是服务业，“客人能看见你们的心”，待客态度决定了他们下次还坐不坐日航[s13][s7]。

在哲学教育之外，他做了两件硬事。其一，是以稻盛经营哲学为底本，编制《日航哲学》和《日航企业理念》，为全员确立共同的判断标准和行为规范，“作为人，何谓正确”再次成为最高准则[s7][s13]。其二，是导入阿米巴式的管理会计：构建起能立刻掌握每一条航线、每一个航班收支情况的机制，确定每条航线的负责人，由其主导想办法提高盈利能力；每月召开业绩报告会，各本部长当着所有人的面发布本部门数字、找出问题、说明改善措施[s7]。过去没人说得清哪条航线亏钱，如今每个航班的盈亏都摊在阳光下，全体员工的成本意识被迅速唤醒[s7]。与此同时，重组也伴随着痛苦的收缩：通过适用更生法的整理解雇和自愿退职，日航员工规模缩减约1.6万人，约占员工总数的三分之一，航线与机队同步精简[s10]。稻盛对留下的人反复讲：“现在形势严峻，不得不裁减员工，但客人始终是最重要的，要更加精心地为客人服务。”[s13]

结果震动了日本产业界。重建前一年，日航销售额约1.5万亿日元，营业利润为负1337亿日元；重建后的第二个财年（截至2012年3月），销售额虽降至1.3622万亿日元，营业利润却达到1884亿日元，成功扭亏，并跻身全球大型航空公司中盈利能力最高的行列；第三个财年营业利润进一步升至2049亿日元，利润率达17%[s4][s7]。2012年9月19日，即退市仅两年零七个月之后，日航以史上最短时间在东京证券交易所重新上市[s7][s10]。

稻盛把成功的真正原因归结为四条：零薪酬带来的无形感召力——员工看到与祖父、父亲同龄的老人分文不取、不顾老命地拼，被深深打动；“三项大义”让员工把重建视为自己的使命；“追求员工幸福”的经营目的赢得了包括工会在内的全员认同；以及对经营干部彻底而持续的哲学教育[s13]。他特别强调，自己几乎没有动用什么高明的“经营技巧”，日航重生靠的是“稻盛哲学”与“阿米巴经营”这两件在京瓷、KDDI反复验证过的武器[s7]。2012年2月，稻盛转任董事名誉会长，2013年起任名誉会长，2015年4月改任名誉顾问，功成身退[s1][s3]。日航一役的意义远超一家公司的起死回生：它证明了一套以道德和人心为核心的经营哲学，可以脱离创始人本人、跨越行业差异、在最僵化的国企废墟上生根开花。这是稻盛和夫留给商业世界最有力的一次实证。

日航重建中有一个细节，常被用来说明稻盛“以心化人”的力量。改革初期，一位工会骨干在学习会上当面顶撞，认为稻盛哲学那套“为员工幸福”的说辞不适用于接受国家援助重建的企业，甚至与经营者计较、质疑变革的诚意，场面一度十分紧张。稻盛没有以位压人，而是激动地把毛巾一把丢过去：“你胡说什么。”随即又缓和下来，对他说：“不要紧张，你提这样的问题，说明你在认真反思公司的问题。”第二天，稻盛对他态度如常，仿佛什么都没发生。这位骨干从此深为信服，逢人便说愿意跟这样的领导干[s13]。在稻盛看来，经营干部可以有疑问、可以争得面红耳赤，但领导人必须让对方感到：你是真心为他、为全体员工好。这种“不相信员工，工作就无法开展”的姿态，比任何KPI都更能穿透日航积重难返的官僚文化[s13]。

数字之外，日航还发生了深层的气质变化。过去日航的员工习惯了“国字头”的优越感，对成本毫无概念——机上餐食多配扔掉、备品随意领用、航班时刻安排只图本部门方便。导入阿米巴式核算后，每个部门、每条航线都要对自己的数字负责，员工开始自发地想办法：调整客座率低的航班时刻、优化餐食搭配、节约燃油与备品[s7][s13]。客舱、地面、维修这些过去各自为政的部门，因为有了共同的哲学和共同的数字，开始跨部门通力协作；乘务员懂得了“待客态度决定乘客下一次选择”，服务意识从被动执行变为主动创造[s7]。稻盛一再说，航空业归根结底是服务业，“客人能看见你们的心”——当三万多名员工真正把这句话当成自己的信念时，成本降下来了，服务上去了，利润自然出现了[s13]。

外界喜欢把日航奇迹归因于稻盛的“经营手腕”，但他本人始终拒绝这种解读。他在复盘讲演中说，日航重建成功的真正原因，一是自己零薪酬、不顾老命投入所激发的员工感动；二是三项大义让员工怀抱使命感；三是“追求员工幸福”的经营目的赢得全员认同；四是对干部彻底的哲学教育[s13]。他特别强调，日航员工后来告诉他，稻盛在日航甚至“没有提过‘哲学’二字”，他只是一遍遍地、用自己的言行告诉大家“作为人应该怎么活、作为干部应该怎么带队伍”[s13]。2013年，稻盛正式退出经营前线。他用一场不拿一分钱报酬、不靠行业经验、全凭人心与制度的战役证明：经营的最高境界，是把正确的做人准则，变成数万人共同的行动。这一年他81岁，距离他在京瓷仓库按下血印，已经过去了54年。

**English:** On January 19, 2010, Japan Airlines, JAL, filed for protection under the Corporate Reorganization Act with the Tokyo District Court, its total liabilities reaching 2.32 trillion yen, about 25.5 billion dollars, one of the largest non-financial corporate bankruptcies in postwar Japan, and its shares were delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on February 20.[s31][s32][s44] Once the largest airline in Japan and the third-largest in the world, the company had long carried a state-enterprise-style high-cost constitution, bitterly divided and complicated labor unions and a bloated route network, and under the shock of the global financial crisis it collapsed with a crash, described by the media as "the symbol of Japan's economic decline."[s11][s7]

The Japanese government's Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation decided to step in with a restructuring, and it needed a manager of great prestige to take command. The then prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, thought of Kazuo Inamori, already seventy-eight and more than ten years into monastic life.[s11] Almost everyone around him was strongly opposed: he had long since withdrawn to the second rank, he understood nothing of the airline business, he was advanced in years, and JAL was a reconstruction widely pronounced "impossible" - the media all but universally predicted it would go bankrupt a second time.[s7][s22] Inamori himself refused again and again, but in the end accepted the invocation for three "great causes": first, reconstructing JAL would prevent a second bankruptcy from shocking the Japanese economy and let the nation's people recover their confidence; second, the jobs of the employees who stayed with the company had to be protected; and third, the fair competitive environment of the airline industry had to be maintained, so as to provide the nation's people with reasonably priced, high-quality service.[s7][s13] In February 2010 he formally took office as JAL's chairman and announced that, given his age and inability to commit himself one hundred percent, he would draw no remuneration whatever - a march to war at zero salary.[s1][s13]

Once in office, Inamori found the problems worse than he had imagined: executives and employees lacked any sense of crisis or responsibility for the company's collapse, headquarters was wholly disconnected from the front line, and the whole company was a sheet of loose sand; most fatal of all, the operating executives had almost no self-awareness as "leaders" and were utterly careless about income and expense accounts.[s7] His reconstruction began not with layoffs and route cuts but with "the human heart." On taking office he declared: "The purpose of the reborn JAL is nothing other than the pursuit of the material and spiritual happiness of all its employees" - carrying the rationale he had followed at Kyocera and KDDI word for word into this moribund state enterprise.[s13] From June 2010 he gathered roughly fifty operating executives and ran them through seventeen concentrated training sessions on the theme of "how one ought to act, both as a human being and as the leader of a team."[s7] He also went in person to the major airports at Haneda and Narita, gathered the pilots, cabin attendants, maintenance staff and ground crews, and told them over and over: the airline industry is in the end a service industry, and "your passengers can see your heart"; the attitude with which you serve them decides whether they will fly JAL again.[s13][s7]

Alongside philosophical education he did two hard things. First, using Inamori management philosophy as the base text, he compiled the JAL Philosophy and the JAL Corporate Philosophy, establishing common judgment criteria and codes of conduct for all staff, with "what is right as a human being" once again made the supreme standard.[s7][s13] Second, he imported amoeba-style management accounting: he built a mechanism for grasping at once the income and outgo of every route and every flight, fixed a person responsible for each route and had that person lead the effort to raise profitability, and held monthly results meetings at which each division head, in front of everyone, announced his department's numbers, identified problems and explained improvement measures.[s7] Where no one had before been able to say which route lost money, the profit and loss of every flight were now laid out in the sunlight, and a cost awareness across all employees was rapidly awakened.[s7] At the same time the reorganization involved painful contraction: through restructuring dismissals under the reorganization law and voluntary retirements, JAL's headcount was cut by roughly 16,000 people, about a third of the workforce, with routes and fleet thinned in step.[s10] To those who stayed Inamori said again and again: "Times are severe now, and we have had no choice but to cut staff; but the passengers remain the most important thing of all, and we must serve them with still greater care."[s13]

The results stunned Japanese industry. In the year before reconstruction JAL's sales were roughly 1.5 trillion yen and its operating profit was a loss of 133.7 billion yen; in the second fiscal year of reconstruction, ending in March 2012, although sales fell to 1.3622 trillion yen, operating profit reached 188.4 billion yen - a successful turnaround that placed JAL among the most profitable of the world's large airlines; in the third fiscal year operating profit rose further to 204.9 billion yen, a profit margin of 17 percent.[s4][s7] On September 19, 2012, just two years and seven months after delisting, JAL relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in the shortest such turnaround in Japanese history.[s7][s10]

Inamori attributed the true causes of the success to four things: the intangible power of attraction of zero salary - employees, seeing an old man the age of their grandfathers and fathers take not a single yen and work as though heedless of his life, were deeply moved; the three great causes, which led employees to regard the reconstruction as their own mission; the management purpose of "pursuing employee happiness," which won the acceptance of everyone, the unions included; and the thoroughgoing, continuous philosophical education of the operating executives.[s13] He stressed in particular that he had employed almost no clever "management techniques"; what revived JAL were the two weapons tested again and again at Kyocera and KDDI - "Inamori philosophy" and "amoeba management."[s7] In February 2012 he became chairman emeritus, in 2013 honorary chairman, and in April 2015 honorary adviser, retiring with the work accomplished.[s1][s3] The significance of the JAL campaign went far beyond the resurrection of one company: it proved that a management philosophy centered on morality and the human heart could detach itself from the founder in person, cross the differences between industries and take root and flower on the ruins of the most rigid of state enterprises. It is the most powerful empirical demonstration Kazuo Inamori left to the business world.

There is one detail from the JAL reconstruction that is often cited to illustrate Inamori's power to "win people through the heart." Early in the reform, a labor-union stalwart confronted him face to face at a study session, arguing that the Inamori philosophy's talk of "working for employee happiness" did not apply to a company being rebuilt with state aid; he even haggled with the manager and questioned the sincerity of the changes, and the scene grew very tense. Inamori did not use his position to crush him but, in agitation, flung a towel at him: "What nonsense you talk." Then, softening at once, he said: "Don't be tense. The fact that you raise a question like this shows you are seriously reflecting on the company's problems." The next day Inamori treated him exactly as usual, as though nothing had happened. The union man was won over from that moment, telling everyone he met that he was willing to work for a leader like this.[s13] In Inamori's view, operating executives may have doubts and may argue until their faces are red, but the leader must make the other feel that he is truly acting for the other's good and for the good of all employees. This posture of "without trusting the employees, the work simply cannot proceed" could penetrate JAL's long-entrenched bureaucratic culture more deeply than any KPI.[s13]

Beyond the numbers, a deep change of temperament took place at JAL. Its employees had grown accustomed to the superiority of the "national flag carrier" and had no conception of cost - extra in-flight meals were loaded and then thrown away, supplies were taken freely, and flight schedules were arranged for the convenience of one's own department alone. Once amoeba-style accounting was introduced, every department and every route became responsible for its own numbers, and employees began on their own initiative to find ways forward: rescheduling flights with low load factors, optimizing meal pairings, saving fuel and supplies.[s7][s13] Cabin, ground and maintenance, the departments that had once each gone their own way, began to cooperate across boundaries because they now shared both a philosophy and the numbers; the cabin attendants came to understand that "the attitude of service determines the passenger's next choice," and the service consciousness shifted from passive execution to active creation.[s7] Inamori said again and again that the airline industry is in the end a service industry and that "your passengers can see your heart" - when more than 30,000 employees truly took these words as their own belief, costs came down, service went up, and profit appeared of its own accord.[s13]

Outside observers liked to attribute the JAL miracle to Inamori's "managerial skill," but he himself always refused that reading. In his review lectures he said that the true reasons for the success of the reconstruction were, first, the emotion aroused in employees by his own zero-salary, life-neglecting commitment; second, the sense of mission that the three great causes gave the employees; third, the management purpose of "pursuing employee happiness," which won everyone's acceptance; and fourth, the thorough philosophical education of the executives.[s13] He emphasized in particular that JAL employees later told him Inamori had "never once even uttered the word 'philosophy'" at JAL; he had only told them again and again, through his own words and deeds, "how a human being ought to live, and how a manager ought to lead his team."[s13] In 2013 Inamori formally left the front line of management. With a campaign that took not a single yen in pay, relied on no industry experience, and depended entirely on the human heart and on institutions, he proved that the highest state of management is to turn the correct code of human conduct into the common action of tens of thousands of people. He was eighty-one that year - fifty-four years after he pressed his blood seal in a Kyocera warehouse.

### 7. 出家与托钵：胃癌、圆福寺与利他之心的真髓 / Taking Vows and Begging Alms: Stomach Cancer, Empuku-ji Temple and the Essence of the Altruistic Heart

稻盛和夫对人生有一个“三段论”：假设人活80年，出生后的20年是踏入社会的准备期，之后的40年是为社会、为自我钻研的工作期，最后的20年则是为死亡——他称之为“灵魂的起程”——做准备的时期[s8]。按照这个规划，他在60岁前后就开始为出世做准备，只是工作太忙一再推迟。1997年，65岁的他决定不能再拖了：从京瓷和第二电电的经营一线引退，转任名誉会长，并请求京都八幡圆福寺的西片担雪住持为他主持出家仪式[s8][s20]。

命运偏偏在此时给了他一场试炼。就在引退后不久的例行体检中，他被确诊胃癌，而且医生告知情况严重。据记载，他拿到诊断当天，仍按原定日程参加了冈山地区的盛和塾塾长例会，回程路上与塾生谈笑风生，深夜到家才认真思量病情，不久便坦然入睡[s21]。手术切除了三分之二的胃，术后伤口缝合不佳，剧痛与禁食让这个一生劝人“体谅他人”的人也忍不住对周围发脾气——事后他为此深感内疚，把这次失态当作反省自己的功课[s21]。原本预定6月的剃度，因病推迟到9月。1997年9月7日，身体尚未完全康复的稻盛在圆福寺接受出家仪式，皈依临济宗妙心寺派，获赐法号“大和”[s8][s20]。

从9月到11月，他在寺院进行了两个多月的短期修行。出家生活远比想象艰苦：凌晨三点起床，夜里十一点就寝，每餐一汤一菜，粥配萝卜酱菜；除了坐禅，还要托钵化缘——头戴竹笠、身披蓝色袈裟、赤足穿草鞋，挨家挨户到施主门前诵经，恳求施舍米粮[s8][s21]。大病初愈的老人，脚趾被草鞋磨出血来，只能把重心移到脚跟，走半天就疲惫得像“用旧的抹布”[s21]。但正是在托钵路上，他获得了毕生难忘的一次体悟。

那是初冬的一个黄昏，他拖着疲惫身躯走在回寺途中，路经一个公园，一位正在打扫公园、身穿工作服的老妇人看见他，一只手拿着扫把跑上前来，很自然地把一枚500日元的硬币轻轻放进他的化缘袋，没有一丝犹豫，也没有一丝傲气[s8][s21]。那一瞬间，稻盛后来写道，一种从未经验过的感动贯穿全身，心中充满难以名状的幸福感。这位妇人看上去绝非富裕之人，却把自己的东西不假思索地施舍给一个素不相识的修行僧——“这样一颗美好的、纯净的心，可以说是我有生65年来从未感受过的”[s21]。他说，这位妇人自然的慈悲，让他确凿地体味到了神佛的爱，也让他真正懂得了“利他之心”的真髓：把自己的事情搁在一边，先去关心别人，这种不假思索的善意，正是人的思想行为中至善至美的一面[s8][s21][s46]。术后他把股份大量分给员工、把财产捐赠财团后只身入寺，曹岫云在《稻盛和夫的成功方程式》中记述了他病中仍坚持修行、为自己失态而反省的细节[s47][s19]。

修行两个月后，西片担雪禅师对他说了一番决定他后半生方向的话：“我们禅宗的出家人，为了自身修炼会坐禅，与世无争，但也没有直接为世间做什么贡献。而你是由在家人成为出家人，对你而言，在认真修行之后，应该重新回到现实生活中为社会做贡献，这才是你应遵行的佛道。仅仅困在寺院这个牢笼里独自修行，并非你的应尽之道。”[s8] 稻盛遵嘱回到社会，从此把“为社会做贡献”当作自己的佛道。

他做的第一件事是全身心投入盛和塾。这一面向中小企业经营者的学习型组织始创于1983年（初名“盛友塾”，1989年改称“盛和塾”），由稻盛志愿担任塾长，分文不取地向年轻经营者传授经营知识与哲学[s3][s35]。到2019年底关闭时，盛和塾在日本国内有56家分塾、海外48家，塾生总数约1.5万人，三十余年间培养了大批经营者[s1][s14]。他做的第二件事是公益慈善：运营稻盛财团与京都奖，为弱势儿童建设京都养护设施“大和之家”，并与京瓷共同捐资在中国设立“稻盛京瓷西部开发奖学基金”，每年资助中国西部数百名大学生[s8][s25][s20]。

出家没有让稻盛和夫变成一个避世的人，反而让他把“利他”从一种需要靠理智时时提醒的道德要求，变成了自然而然的生命本能。他后来说，过去讲“利他”，往往要有意识地告诫自己、强迫自己这样做；出家之后，“利他”已成为一种完全自觉的思想和行为[s21]。2020年，88岁的他出版了被称为“收官之作”的《心：稻盛和夫的一生嘱托》，把一生的心法浓缩为一句话：人生的一切，都由“心”开始，也由“心”决定[s43]。而13年后，当年确诊的胃癌并未复发——连这一点，也被喜欢附会的读者视为心境改变命运的注脚。对稻盛而言，托钵路上那枚500日元硬币的温度，比任何商业成功都更接近他一生追寻的答案。

稻盛和夫的出家，常被外界浪漫化，但其内里是一个极其理性的人对生死的清醒安排。他认为经营者应在还能做出正确判断时毅然退出一线，给后继者更大的空间，而不是恋栈权力直到昏聩[s21]。65岁引退、出家，正是他人生三段论的严格执行：把最后的岁月留给灵魂。他甚至在确诊胃癌前就已安排好股权——把自己持有的公司股份大量分配给员工，把个人财产捐赠设立财团，安排得干干净净后才只身入寺[s19][s21]。这种“散财以求心安”的做法，与他“动机至善、私心了无”的信条完全一致。

圆福寺的两个多月，也让他对“利他”有了从理性到体验的跃升。他说，过去讲利他，往往需要有意识地时时告诫自己，用理智强迫自己必须这样做；而出家之后，利他成了一种自然而然、不假思索的本能[s21]。那枚500日元硬币之所以让他震撼，正在于老妇人的善举完全没有“我在做好事”的刻意——她只是看见一个疲惫的修行僧，本能地伸出了手。稻盛由此体认到：最高的道德不是勉力而为的善行，而是化为天性的慈悲[s8][s21]。他把这种体悟带回经营，更加坚定地认为“利他之心”不是道德说教，而是宇宙运行的根本法则——顺应这股让万物向善的力量，事业自然长久[s40][s41]。

西片担雪禅师“回到社会做贡献就是你的佛道”的开示，为稻盛的晚年重新定位[s8]。他没有留在寺庙，而是以名誉会长、塾长、理事长的身份奔走了二十多年：主持盛和塾的世界大会，一届又一届地为塾生讲演点评，直到2019年87岁时才因年事已高关闭盛和塾；运营京都奖，把一批不为人熟知的科学家、艺术家推到世界面前；为失去家庭照料的弱势儿童建立京都养护设施“大和之家”，法号“大和”由此有了人间的落点；还捐资支持中国西部教育、在凯斯西储大学设立伦理研究中心、在CSIS设立领导者资质学院[s3][s8][s20][s25]。一个出家的僧人，反而以更入世的方式践行慈悲——这构成了稻盛晚年最动人的悖论。2010年日本政府请他出山重建日航时，他本已在寺院与公益中安度晚年，却因“三项大义”再度披挂上阵。对一个把“为社会做贡献”视为佛道的人来说，拯救日航不是重返商场，而是他后半生那场修行的一部分[s7][s13]。

**English:** Kazuo Inamori held to a "three-stage theory" of life: assuming a person lives eighty years, the first twenty after birth are a period of preparation for entering society, the following forty are a working period of effort for society and for self-cultivation, and the final twenty are a period of preparing for death - which he called "the soul's departure."[s8] According to this plan he had begun, around the age of sixty, to prepare for leaving the secular world, but the press of work postponed it again and again. In 1997, at sixty-five, he decided he could wait no longer: he retired from the front line of management at both Kyocera and Daini-Denden to become chairman emeritus, and asked the abbot Tansetsu Nishikata of Empuku-ji Temple in Yawata, Kyoto, to conduct his ordination ceremony.[s8][s20]

Fate chose precisely this moment to hand him a trial. In a routine checkup not long after his retirement, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and the doctors told him the condition was grave. According to the record, on the very day he received the diagnosis he kept his scheduled appearance at the Seiwajuku regional head's meeting in the Okayama district, chatted and laughed with the members on the way back, and only thought through the illness seriously when he reached home late at night, whereupon he calmly fell asleep.[s21] Surgery removed two-thirds of his stomach; the wound afterward closed poorly, and the severe pain and fasting so tried the man who had spent his life urging others to "be considerate of those around you" that he could not help snapping at the people about him - a lapse for which he afterward felt deep remorse, taking it as a lesson in self-reflection.[s21] The tonsure originally set for June was postponed by the illness until September. On September 7, 1997, his body not yet fully recovered, Inamori received the ordination rites at Empuku-ji, took refuge in the Myoshinji school of the Rinzai Zen sect, and was given the Buddhist name Daiwa, "Great Harmony."[s8][s20]

From September to November he spent more than two months in short-term training at the temple. Monastic life proved far harsher than he had imagined: up at three in the morning, to bed at eleven at night, one soup and one vegetable dish at each meal, rice porridge with pickled radish; and beyond seated meditation there was the takuhatsu alms round - wearing a bamboo hat and a blue surplice, barefoot in straw sandals, going from house to house of the donors to chant the sutras and beg for offerings of rice.[s8][s21] The old man, but recently recovered from grave illness, had his toes rubbed bloody by the straw sandals and could only shift his weight to his heels; after half a day of walking he was exhausted, he said, like "a worn-out rag."[s21] Yet it was on the alms road that he gained the most unforgettable insight of his life.

It was at dusk in early winter. He was dragging his tired body back toward the temple, passing a park, when an elderly woman in work clothes who had been sweeping the park saw him and ran up with a broom still in one hand, quite naturally dropping a single 500-yen coin gently into his alms bag, without a flicker of hesitation and without a trace of pride.[s8][s21] At that instant, Inamori later wrote, an emotion he had never experienced before ran through his entire body, and his heart filled with a happiness he could not name. The woman did not look at all wealthy, yet without a second thought she gave something of her own to a mendicant monk she had never met - "such a beautiful, pure heart, I can say I had never felt anything like it in my sixty-five years."[s21] Her unforced compassion, he said, let him taste with certainty the love of the divine and the Buddha, and let him truly understand the essence of the "altruistic heart": to set one's own affairs aside and concern oneself first with another - this unthinking, uncalculated kindness is the supremely good and beautiful side of human thought and conduct.[s8][s21][s46] After the surgery he distributed much of his shareholding to his employees and donated his assets to his foundation before entering the temple alone; Cao Xiuyun, in Kazuo Inamori's Success Equation, records the details of his persisting in monastic practice while ill and of his self-reproach for his own lapse.[s47][s19]

After two months of training, the Zen master Tansetsu Nishikata said to him the words that set the course of the rest of his life: "We monks of the Zen school practice zazen for our own cultivation and contend with nothing in the world, but neither do we contribute anything directly to the world. You became a monk from the laity, and for you, after earnest practice, to return to the real world and contribute to society - that is the Buddhist path you ought to follow. To stay confined within the cage of a temple practicing alone is not your appointed way."[s8] Inamori obeyed and returned to society, from then on taking "contributing to society" as his own Buddhist path.

The first thing he did was to throw himself wholeheartedly into Seiwajuku. This learning organization for managers of small and medium enterprises began in 1983, initially as Seiyujyuku and renamed Seiwajyuku in 1989, with Inamori serving as its head on a volunteer basis, imparting management knowledge and philosophy to young managers without taking a single yen.[s3][s35] By the time it closed at the end of 2019, Seiwajuku had fifty-six branches in Japan and forty-eight overseas, with roughly 15,000 members in all, and over more than three decades it had trained a great corps of managers.[s1][s14] The second thing he did was public philanthropy: running the Inamori Foundation and the Kyoto Prize, building the Kyoto Daiwa Children's Home for disadvantaged children, and together with Kyocera donating to establish the Inamori-Kyocera Western Development Scholarship Fund in China, which each year supports several hundred university students in western China.[s8][s25][s20]

Taking vows did not make Kazuo Inamori into a man fleeing the world; on the contrary, it turned "altruism" from a moral demand he had consciously to remind himself of into a natural instinct of life. He later said that in the past, when he spoke of altruism, he had often had to warn and force himself deliberately to act so; after entering the priesthood, altruism had become a fully conscious way of thinking and acting. [s21] In 2020, at eighty-eight, he published Heart: The Final Testament of Kazuo Inamori, described as his closing work, in which the methods of a lifetime were condensed into one sentence: everything in life begins with the heart and is decided by the heart.[s43] And the stomach cancer diagnosed thirteen years earlier never recurred - a fact, too, that readers fond of pattern-making took as a footnote on the state of mind changing fate. For Inamori, the warmth of that 500-yen coin on the alms road came closer than any business success to the answer he had sought all his life.

Kazuo Inamori's ordination is often romanticized by the outside world, but at its core it was a sober arrangement of life and death by an eminently rational man. He believed that a manager should resolutely withdraw from the front line while he can still make correct judgments, leaving greater room for his successors, rather than clinging to power until he grows dotard.[s21] Retiring and taking vows at sixty-five was the strict execution of his three-stage theory of life: leaving the final years to the soul. He had even arranged his shareholding before the cancer was diagnosed - distributing the company shares he held in large measure to his employees and donating his personal assets to establish his foundations, settling everything cleanly before he entered the temple alone.[s19][s21] This practice of "scattering his wealth to set his heart at ease" was perfectly consistent with his creed of "a wholly good motive and utterly erased self-interest."

The two-odd months at Empuku-ji also let his understanding of altruism leap from rational assent to lived experience. In the past, he said, to speak of altruism he had often needed consciously to warn himself moment by moment, forcing himself by reason to act so; after ordination, altruism became a natural, unthinking instinct.[s21] The reason the 500-yen coin had shaken him so was that the old woman's kindness contained not the slightest deliberateness of "I am doing a good deed" - she had simply seen an exhausted mendicant monk and reached out by instinct. Inamori thereby came to realize that the highest morality is not good deeds striven for with effort, but compassion that has become second nature.[s8][s21] He carried this insight back into management, holding more firmly than ever that the "altruistic heart" is no moral sermon but the fundamental law of the universe: to conform to this force that moves all things toward the good is to ensure that the enterprise endures of itself.[s40][s41]

The Zen master Tansetsu Nishikata's instruction that "to return to society and contribute is your Buddhist path" repositioned Inamori's old age.[s8] He did not remain at the temple; for more than twenty years he went about the world in the capacities of chairman emeritus, head of Seiwajuku and foundation chairman. He presided over Seiwajuku's world conventions, lecturing and critiquing for his members session after session, and only in 2019, at eighty-seven, closed Seiwajuku because of his great age. He ran the Kyoto Prize, bringing little-known scientists and artists before the world. He built the Kyoto Daiwa Children's Home for disadvantaged children without family care, so that his Buddhist name Daiwa found a lodging in the human world. And he donated to support education in western China, established the Inamori International Center for Ethics and Excellence at Case Western Reserve University, and helped found the Abshire-Inamori Leadership Academy at CSIS.[s3][s8][s20][s25] An ordained monk, of all people, practiced compassion in a more worldly way than anyone - and that constitutes the most moving paradox of Inamori's old age. When the Japanese government called on him in 2010 to rebuild Japan Airlines, he had already been passing his later years serenely between temple and philanthropy, yet he girded himself for battle once more for the sake of the three great causes. To a man who regarded "contributing to society" as his Buddhist path, saving JAL was no return to the marketplace but part of the spiritual training of his latter life.[s7][s13]

### 8. 活法与干法：著作体系里的东方人生哲学 / Way of Living and Way of Working: An Eastern Life Philosophy in the Architecture of His Books

稻盛和夫一生著述颇丰，其中流传最广、影响最大的，是被读者合称为“活法三部曲”或“稻盛哲学”的一批大众读物。与一般企业管理书籍不同，他的书几乎不谈战略模型与资本运作，谈的是心性、劳动、道德与人生意义——用他自己的话说，他要回答的根本问题是“人为什么活着”[s40][s41]。

《活法》（2004年）是他的代表作，日文版累计销量超过130万册，中文版在中国成为超级畅销书。书中开宗明义：“人生的意义在于不断提升自己的心性”，人活着的终极目的，是“提升心性、磨练灵魂”，让自己的灵魂在离开时比到来时更纯净一点[s40][s41]。他把人生比喻为灵魂的修炼场：无论遭遇幸运还是灾难，都是磨练心性的机会；成功时不傲慢、失败时不怨恨，始终以“作为人，何谓正确”为指针，坚持勤奋、诚实、谦虚、利他这些最朴素的德行，人生就会朝好的方向展开[s40]。书中那句“心不唤物，物不至”——内心不强烈渴望的东西，不会自动靠近你——成为流传最广的金句之一：只有先在脑中清晰“看见”目标实现时的状态，让愿望渗透到潜意识，行动才会被真正点燃[s14][s41]。

《干法》（2009年）回答的是“人该如何工作”。这本书的副标题直接点题：工作不是谋生的手段，而是“磨练心志、提升人格”的修行[s39][s42]。稻盛反对把工作视为必要之恶的功利态度，主张“热爱工作、迷恋工作”是通往成功的捷径：人只有把自己逼进全力以赴的状态，“付出不亚于任何人的努力”，才能在克服困难的过程中克服懒惰与浮躁，培养出坚韧、专注的品格[s39]。他提出“认为不行的时候，正是工作的开始”——当你觉得走投无路、想放弃的那一刻，才是真正需要开动脑筋、激发潜能、寻找突破口的起点[s14][s39]。“答案在现场”是他的另一句名言：现场有神灵，经营者必须亲临一线，用眼睛、耳朵、身体去觉知真实，纸面上的理论替代不了车间里、客舱中、柜台前的事实[s33][s42]。

《阿米巴经营》（2006年）则是他管理模式的系统阐述，把“划小核算单元、让员工成为经营者”的机制设计、单位时间核算表的用法、哲学共有的配套要求完整呈现，成为各国企业导入阿米巴时的教科书[s33][s42]。此外，《经营为什么需要哲学》《经营十二条》《六项精进》《会计七原则》《成功方程式》《心法》等著作，分别从经营目的、行动纲领、财务原则、人才观与精神修养等侧面，构成了一个完整的思想体系[s14][s33][s40]。2020年出版的《心：稻盛和夫的一生嘱托》，以“心”为纲统摄一生心得，被他视为留给后人的最后嘱托[s43]。

这个思想体系的骨架，可以概括为几条一以贯之的主线。其一是“成功方程式”：人生·工作的结果＝思维方式×热情×能力。能力是天赋，热情是努力的程度，而思维方式——也就是价值观、心性——取值可正可负，是决定方向的关键变量；思维方式错了，能力越强、热情越高，破坏越大[s14][s41]。其二是“作为人，何谓正确”的判断基准：把不可交易的道德律令置于一切经营算计之上[s33]。其三是“利他经营”：“自利则生，利他则久”，企业只有为客户、员工、社会创造价值，自身的成功才能长久；他甚至提出排序——员工第一，客户第二，股东最后，因为“员工把一生托付给公司”，企业最重要的使命是保障员工及其家庭的幸福[s33][s13]。其四是“劳动即修行”的工作观与“萧条是成长机会”的周期观：1973年石油危机、2008年金融危机，他都坚持不裁人、练内功、逆势投入，把衰退期视为超越对手的窗口期[s22][s31]。

耐人寻味的是，这套话语带有浓厚的东方色彩——它近于儒家的仁义与修身、禅宗的精进与无我、武士道的忠义与克己，也呼应了涩泽荣一“《论语》加算盘”的日本式资本主义传统[s30][s41]。著名学者季羡林曾评价：“根据我七八十年来的观察，既是企业家又是哲学家，一身而二任的人，简直如凤毛麟角，有之自稻盛和夫先生始。”[s38] 万科创始人王石则说：“稻盛先生多次强调人生是提升心志的过程、人生不过是宇宙造物主赐予人类的提升心志的修道场，我很赞同这样的说法。”[s38] 在西方管理学普遍以股东价值最大化、科层制与KPI考核为中心的背景下，稻盛提供了一种截然不同的可能性：把工作场所变成精神成长的道场，用唤醒良知而非强化管控的方式驱动组织[s14][s40]。这正是他的著作在经济下行期一次次被重新捧起的原因——人们在迷茫时寻找的，从来不只是赚钱的方法，更是安身立命的依据。

从思想谱系看，稻盛和夫的哲学并非凭空创造，而是几条东方精神河流在现代企业中的汇合。他自幼浸润于萨摩的乡中教育，崇敬同乡西乡隆盛，“敬天爱人”本就是西乡的座右铭；西乡“不为自己、而为天下”的无私人格，成为他衡量领导者境界的标尺[s30]。他中年后倾心佛学，临济宗的禅修让他把“精进”“反省”“感谢”这些修行功课直接转化为“六项精进”的日常条目[s8][s14]。而他对“义利之辨”的回答——企业必须赚钱，但赚钱的方式与目的必须合乎道义——又与日本“资本主义之父”涩泽荣一“《论语》加算盘”的传统一脉相承[s41]。不同的是，稻盛把这些传统智慧做了现代企业所需的“转译”：用阿米巴核算表承接“格物致知”的务实精神，用晨会与哲学手册承接“修身”的日用功夫，用“员工幸福”的经营理念承接“仁者爱人”的儒家立场[s33][s42]。

这种转译的力量，在经济周期的起伏中格外明显。日本泡沫经济破灭后，“失去的二十年”里，许多曾迷信规模与投机的企业陷入泥潭，而稻盛反复讲述的“萧条是成长的机会”“不投机、储备现金、全员营销、全力开发新产品”等逆周期智慧，被困境中的经营者视为圭臬[s31][s14]。2008年金融危机后，他与马云对谈时直言危机是“神灵对人类的惩戒”，劝人知足、反省、谦虚[s17]——这类话语在高歌猛进的年代显得不合时宜，在退潮后的海滩上却被反复拾起。他的书之所以每遇经济下行就再畅销一轮，根本原因在于：他提供的不是预测周期的技巧，而是穿越周期的心法[s40][s39]。

当然，作为一套被数千万人阅读的大众哲学，稻盛思想在传播中也难免被简化、被鸡汤化。“付出不亚于任何人的努力”“每天反省”这样的句子，如果脱离他九十年身体力行的实证——他去世后“心态决定命运”一类话题再度刷屏[s48]——脱离镁橄榄石的窑火、脱离血印誓词、脱离零薪酬的日航岁月——就容易沦为空洞的励志口号[s14][s33]。但这或许正是经典的命运：真正有力量的东西，从来不是文字本身，而是文字背后那个用一生兑现文字的人。正如他在《干法》中所写，人生最重要的就是“持续做好一件事”，踏踏实实、一步一个脚印，把分配给自己的工作当作天职，一辈子持之以恒[s14][s39]。他自己就是这句话最长情的注脚——一个地方大学毕业的陶瓷工程师，用一辈子只做了一件事：把“作为人应该做的正确之事，以正确的方式贯彻到底”[s33]。

**English:** Kazuo Inamori was prolific, and the books of his that spread furthest and carried the greatest influence were a body of popular works that readers collectively call his "Way of Living trilogy" or simply Inamori philosophy. Unlike ordinary business-management books, his volumes speak almost not at all of strategic models or capital operations; they speak of the mind, of labor, of morality and of the meaning of life - in his own words, the fundamental question he meant to answer was "why human beings live."[s40][s41]

A Compass to Fulfillment (2004) is his representative work, with cumulative sales of the Japanese edition of more than 1.3 million copies, and the Chinese edition became a super-bestseller in China. The book states at the outset that "the meaning of life lies in continually elevating one's character"; the ultimate purpose of being alive is "to elevate the mind and temper the soul," so that one's soul, at departure, is a little purer than it was at arrival.[s40][s41] He likens life to a training ground for the soul: whether one meets good fortune or disaster, both are opportunities to temper the mind; without arrogance in success and without resentment in failure, always taking "what is right as a human being" as one's compass and holding to the plainest virtues - diligence, honesty, humility and altruism - life will unfold in a good direction.[s40] The book's line that "what the mind does not summon will not come" - what the heart does not desire intensely will not approach you of itself - became one of his most widely circulated sayings: only when you first "see" clearly in your mind the state in which the goal has been realized, letting the desire soak into the subconscious, will action truly be ignited.[s14][s41]

The True Meaning of Work (2009) answers the question of how a person ought to work. The book's subtitle goes straight to the theme: work is no means of earning a livelihood but a practice that "tempers the mind and elevates character."[s39][s42] Inamori rejected the utilitarian attitude that treats work as a necessary evil, arguing that to "love your work, be captivated by your work" is the shortcut to success: only when a person drives himself into a state of total commitment and exerts an effort second to none can he overcome laziness and restlessness in the very process of overcoming difficulties, cultivating a character of resilience and focus.[s39] He taught that "the moment you decide that something cannot be done is precisely where the work begins" - the instant you feel at your wits' end and want to give up is the true starting point at which to set the mind working, tap hidden potential and search for a breakthrough.[s14][s39] "The answer is in the gemba" is another of his celebrated sayings: the god dwells in the field, and the manager must go in person to the front line, perceiving reality with his eyes, ears and body, for the theories on paper cannot replace the facts of the workshop, the aircraft cabin or the service counter.[s33][s42]

Amoeba Management (2006) is the systematic exposition of his management model, laying out in full the design of the mechanism that "draws accounting units small and makes employees into managers," the use of the unit-time accounting sheet and the companion requirement of shared philosophy; it became the textbook for companies introducing amoeba management in country after country.[s33][s42] Beyond these, works such as Why Management Needs Philosophy, The Twelve Management Principles, The Six Disciplines, The Seven Principles of Accounting, The Success Equation and Mind Mastery constitute, from the sides of management purpose, action guidelines, financial principles, the view of talent and spiritual cultivation, a complete system of thought.[s14][s33][s40] Heart: The Final Testament of Kazuo Inamori, published in 2020, takes "the heart" as the thread unifying the insights of a lifetime, and he regarded it as his last bequest to those after him.[s43]

The skeleton of this system of thought can be reduced to a few unbroken main lines. The first is the success equation: the results of life and work equal mindset multiplied by passion multiplied by ability. Ability is innate endowment and passion is the degree of effort, while mindset - that is, values and character - can take either a positive or a negative value and is the crucial variable that determines direction; if the mindset is wrong, the greater the ability and the higher the passion, the greater the destruction.[s14][s41] The second is the criterion of "what is right as a human being," placing the moral imperatives that cannot be bargained away above every management calculation.[s33] The third is altruistic management: "self-interest lets you survive, but altruism lets you endure," and a company's success can last only if it creates value for customers, employees and society; he even proposed an ordering - employees first, customers second, shareholders last - because "employees entrust their entire lives to the company," and the firm's most important mission is to safeguard the happiness of its employees and their families.[s33][s13] The fourth is the work-view that "labor itself is spiritual practice" and the cycle-view that "a recession is an opportunity for growth": in the 1973 oil crisis and the 2008 financial crisis alike, he refused layoffs, trained the company's inner capabilities and invested against the tide, treating periods of downturn as windows in which to overtake rivals.[s22][s31]

It is striking how deeply this language is colored by the East: it is close to the Confucian benevolence and self-cultivation, to the Zen pursuit of diligence and no-self, and to the loyalty, righteousness and self-restraint of bushido, and it echoes the Japanese-capitalist tradition of Shibusawa Eiichi's "Analects together with the abacus."[s30][s41] The eminent scholar Ji Xianlin once assessed him: "In my observation over seventy or eighty years, the man who is both entrepreneur and philosopher, bearing the two callings in a single person, is rarer than the phoenix's feather or the qilin's horn; and if such a man exists, it begins with Mr. Kazuo Inamori."[s38] Wang Shi, the founder of Vanke, said: "Mr. Inamori has stressed many times that life is a process of elevating one's mind, and that life is nothing more than a dojo for elevating the mind, granted to humankind by the creator of the universe; I quite agree with such words."[s38] Against the background of Western management science, centered as it is on maximizing shareholder value, on hierarchy and on KPI assessment, Inamori offered a fundamentally different possibility: to turn the workplace into a dojo of spiritual growth, and to drive the organization by awakening conscience rather than tightening control.[s14][s40] That is precisely why his books have been picked up again and again in times of economic downturn: what people seek when they are lost is never only a method of making money, but a basis on which to settle and order their lives.

Seen in the genealogy of ideas, Kazuo Inamori's philosophy was not created out of nothing but the confluence in the modern corporation of several Eastern spiritual rivers. He was steeped from childhood in Satsuma's goju education and revered his fellow native Saigo Takamori, whose motto "revere the divine and love people" had always been; Saigo's selfless character, "acting not for oneself but for all under heaven," became the yardstick by which Inamori measured a leader's stature.[s30] In middle age he gave his heart to Buddhism, and the meditation practice of Rinzai Zen led him to convert the monastic disciplines of diligence, reflection and gratitude directly into the daily items of the Six Disciplines.[s8][s14] And his answer to the classic debate over righteousness versus profit - that the company must make money, but the manner and purpose of making it must accord with the moral way - runs in a direct line from the tradition of Shibusawa Eiichi, the "father of Japanese capitalism," with his "Analects together with the abacus."[s41] What differs is that Inamori "translated" these traditional wisdoms into the forms the modern enterprise requires: the practical spirit of "investigating things to arrive at knowledge" carried by the amoeba accounting sheet, the daily discipline of "cultivating one's person" carried by the morning meetings and the philosophy handbook, and the Confucian position of "the benevolent love others" carried by the management rationale of employee happiness.[s33][s42]

The power of this translation shows itself with particular clarity across the ups and downs of the economic cycle. After Japan's bubble economy burst, in the "lost two decades," many companies that had believed in scale and speculation were mired in the mud, while the counter-cyclical wisdom Inamori told and retold - "a recession is an opportunity for growth," "no speculation, hold cash reserves, all-member marketing, throw everything into new-product development" - was taken as a standard by managers in adversity.[s31][s14] After the financial crisis of 2008, in conversation with Jack Ma, he said bluntly that the crisis was "a chastisement sent to humankind by nature or by the gods," urging contentment, reflection and humility;[s17] such language had seemed out of tune in the years of roaring advance, but on the beach after the tide went out it was picked up again and again. The root reason his books sell in fresh waves with every economic downturn is that he offers not a technique for predicting cycles but a mental method for crossing them.[s40][s39]

Naturally, as a popular philosophy read by tens of millions, Inamori's thought could not but be simplified and reduced to chicken-soup in the course of its spread. Sentences such as "exert an effort second to none" and "reflect every day," once detached from the empirical evidence of ninety years of personal practice - after his death, topics along the lines of "mindset decides fate" flooded the screens once more[s48] - and detached from the kiln fire of forsterite, from the blood-signed pledge and from the zero-salary JAL years, easily degenerate into empty motivational slogans.[s14][s33] But this may be precisely the fate of classics: what truly carries force is never the text itself but the man behind the text who spent his life making the text good. As he wrote in The True Meaning of Work, the most important thing in life is to "keep doing one thing well" - steadfastly, step by step, footprint by footprint, treating the work assigned to you as a calling and persisting for a lifetime.[s14][s39] He himself is the longest-lived footnote to that sentence - a ceramics engineer from a regional university who used a lifetime to do only one thing: to carry through, in the right way, the right things a human being ought to do.[s33]

### 9. 跨越国界的回响：盛和塾、中国企业家与精神遗产 / Echoes Across National Borders: Seiwajuku, China's Entrepreneurs and a Spiritual Legacy

稻盛和夫的影响在日本之外，最集中地体现在中国。1980年代以来，他多次访华，2001年与京瓷共同捐资设立面向中国西部大学生的奖学基金，2004年获中日友好协会授予“中日友好使者”称号，2009年受邀出席新中国成立60周年庆典活动，2012年在重庆大剧院举行的经营哲学报告会吸引1700余名企业家，门票一度高达5800元一张[s14][s20][s28]。他的《活法》《干法》等著作中文版销量以百万计，盛和塾的中国分塾在各地生根，他在新浪微博的粉丝超过1100万[s14][s16]。

中国一线企业家几乎都对稻盛哲学有过公开回应。海尔集团创始人张瑞敏是最早也最深入的对话者之一。2010年稻盛访问海尔时，张瑞敏当面说：“稻盛先生的经营哲学里有两条对我们非常重要：一个是敬天爱人；另外一个就是阿米巴经营组织。”他还感慨：“我们如果早一天认识您，海尔会发展得更快！”[s15][s16] 张瑞敏后来在海尔推行的“人单合一”模式，与阿米巴“人人都是经营者”的理念有明显的呼应——他在推进变革前曾对稻盛说：“如果我们早一点接触阿米巴、接触稻盛经营哲学，我们的自主经济体或许会少走不少弯路。”[s29] 但张瑞敏同时保持着清醒的本土化判断：阿米巴主要靠精神激励、不搞物质奖励，在中国当前环境下照搬行不通；而且阿米巴本质上仍是“正三角”式下级听命上级的结构，海尔的“人单合一”则要求每个团队直接面对市场[s29][s15]。学习而不照搬，取神而弃形，这或许是中国式借鉴最成熟的样本。

阿里巴巴创始人马云两度在危机时刻赴日请教。2008年全球金融危机爆发后不久，马云专程拜访稻盛，请教企业家应对危机应有的心态；稻盛对他说，金融危机是“自然或者神灵对人类的惩戒”，欲望膨胀到极点必然“月盈则亏”，危机教育人懂得“知足”、学会谦虚[s17]。2019年阿里巴巴成立20周年、马云面临交棒抉择时，再次拜访稻盛，随后在9月辞去阿里巴巴董事局主席职务，把更多时间投向教育与公益[s16]。马云曾在推荐语中写道：“到了今天，企业家最关心的问题是有关人本身的问题。人为什么活着？企业存在的意义何在？我们应该对社会做出怎样的贡献？我从稻盛经营哲学中学到了很多。”[s38] 福耀集团创始人曹德旺与稻盛有过电视对话，他赞同稻盛“企业家要追求高尚人格”的观点，并在日后回忆，遇到经营环境变化的困惑时，稻盛一句“敬天爱人”给出的是根本性解答；2026年，曹德旺创办的福耀科技大学将校训定为“敬天爱人，止于至善”，直接把这位日本经营者的信条刻进了中国一所新型大学的门楣[s27][s28]。

这种跨文化的共鸣并非偶然。改革开放后成长起来的中国企业家，在短短三四十年里走完了西方上百年的工业化历程，也密集遭遇了扩张冲动与泡沫破裂、物质财富与精神空虚、短期利润与长期主义之间的撕裂。稻盛哲学恰好回应了这种“成长的烦恼”：它不谈玄妙，只讲“付出不亚于任何人的努力”“每天反省”“谦虚戒骄”这类人人可践行的功夫；它既承认逐利的正当（“销售最大化、经费最小化”），又为利润之上安放了“利他”与“员工幸福”的意义；它用京瓷从未亏损、日航起死回生这样的硬案例，证明道德不是经营的装饰品而是竞争力本身[s33][s40]。对一个缺乏自身商业伦理传统、又急于寻找确定性的群体来说，这套来自同属东亚文化圈的、“可操作的心性论”，填补了一个巨大的精神空缺[s35][s36]。

2019年底，盛和塾在日本本土宣告关闭，稻盛当时说自己已年近九旬，无力再像过去那样主持学习[s3][s35]。但思想的传播并未停止：在中国，各地盛和塾学习平台已汇聚数万名企业家学员，一年一度的稻盛经营学企业践行报告会规模盛大，2025年在太原举行的第十七届大会就有5000余名经营者参加[s35][s36]。2022年8月稻盛去世后，中国外交部发言人公开肯定他为中日友好交流作出的贡献，中国媒体与网友自发大规模悼念[s10][s14]。

当然，热潮之中也不乏冷静的声音。有人指出，稻盛哲学在日本企业的成功，深深嵌入终身雇佣、年功序列与集体主义的制度土壤，抽离这些前提，单靠晨会背诵哲学语录并不能产生阿米巴式的凝聚力[s29][s15]；也有人提醒，围绕“稻盛热”形成的培训、咨询与出版产业链，存在将复杂思想简化为成功学口号的倾向[s14]。但这些争议本身，恰恰印证了稻盛遗产的生命力——一个不值得认真对待的人，不会引发认真的争论。

2022年8月30日，《朝日新闻》在悼评中写道，通过创立KDDI，稻盛不仅推动了日本国内长途电话降费，还推动了手机的普及[s10]。《读卖新闻》则评价他“作为象征战后日本的实业家而知名，为培养企业家和推动科学、文化事业倾注心血”[s14]。京瓷社长谷本秀夫、KDDI会长田中孝司、日本航空先后发表悼词，感念他留下的“以作为人何谓正确为坐标的经营哲学”[s10]。一个人去世后，他创办的公司仍在运转，他设立的奖项仍在颁发，他的书仍在被千万人翻阅，他的信条被异国的大学刻成校训——这大概就是“经营之圣”四个字最实在的含义。

**English:** Outside Japan, Kazuo Inamori's influence has been concentrated most powerfully in China. From the 1980s onward he visited China many times: in 2001 he and Kyocera jointly endowed a scholarship fund for university students in western China; in 2004 the China-Japan Friendship Association named him an "Envoy of Sino-Japanese Friendship"; in 2009 he was invited to the celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic; and in 2012 a management-philosophy report meeting at the Chongqing Grand Theatre drew more than 1,700 entrepreneurs, with tickets at one point trading as high as 5,800 yuan apiece.[s14][s20][s28] The Chinese editions of books such as A Compass to Fulfillment and The True Meaning of Work have sold in the millions, Chinese branches of Seiwajuku have taken root across the country, and his following on the Sina Weibo microblog exceeded 11 million.[s14][s16]

Almost every leading Chinese entrepreneur has responded publicly to Inamori philosophy. Zhang Ruimin, the founder of Haier Group, was among its earliest and most serious interlocutors. When Inamori visited Haier in 2010, Zhang told him to his face: "Two things in Mr. Inamori's management philosophy are of the greatest importance to us: one is to revere the divine and love people, and the other is the amoeba management organization." He also said with feeling: "Had we made your acquaintance even one day earlier, Haier would have developed faster!"[s15][s16] The Rend anHeYi - "individual-goal combination" - model that Zhang later pushed through at Haier has a clear resonance with the amoeba idea that "everyone is a manager"; before driving the reform forward he told Inamori: "If we had encountered amoeba management and Inamori philosophy even a little earlier, our self-managing operations might have avoided quite a few detours."[s29] Yet Zhang kept a clear-eyed, localized judgment as well: amoeba management relies chiefly on spiritual incentives and offers no material rewards, and copying it wholesale will not work in China's present environment; moreover, amoeba management remains in essence an "upright triangle" structure in which the lower ranks obey the ranks above, whereas Haier's Rend anHeYi requires every team to face the market directly.[s29][s15] To learn without copying, to take the spirit and discard the form - that may be the most mature specimen of the Chinese manner of borrowing.

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, twice traveled to Japan to seek Inamori's counsel at moments of crisis. Shortly after the global financial crisis broke out in 2008, Ma paid a special visit to Inamori to ask what frame of mind entrepreneurs should hold in facing crisis; Inamori told him that a financial crisis is "a chastisement sent to humankind by nature or by the gods," that desire swollen to its extreme must follow the moon's waxing into waning, and that crisis teaches people to know "contentment" and to learn humility.[s17] In 2019, as Alibaba marked its twentieth anniversary and Ma faced his own choice over handing over the baton, he visited Inamori once more, and in September resigned as executive chairman of Alibaba to devote more time to education and public welfare.[s16] Ma wrote in one recommendation: "Today, the question entrepreneurs care about most is the question concerning the human being itself. Why do people live? What is the meaning of a company's existence? What contribution ought we to make to society? I have learned a great deal from Inamori management philosophy."[s38] Cho Dewang, the founder of Fuyao Group, held a televised dialogue with Inamori; he endorsed Inamori's view that "the entrepreneur must pursue a lofty character," and later recalled that when he was perplexed by changes in the operating environment, Inamori's single phrase "revere the divine and love people" gave him a fundamental answer. In 2026 the Fuyao University of Science and Technology founded by Cho Dewang fixed its school motto as "revere the divine and love people, rest in the highest excellence," carving the Japanese manager's creed directly into the lintel of a new-style Chinese university.[s27][s28]

This cross-cultural resonance was no accident. The Chinese entrepreneurs who grew up after reform and opening-up compressed into a mere thirty or forty years the industrialization that the West took more than a century to complete, and they also ran headlong, in dense succession, into the rifts between expansionary impulse and bursting bubbles, between material wealth and spiritual emptiness, and between short-term profit and long-termism. Inamori philosophy answered precisely these growing pains: it spoke of nothing recondite, only of practices anyone could carry out - "exert an effort second to none," "reflect every day," "be humble and shun pride"; it acknowledged the legitimacy of pursuing profit with its "maximize sales, minimize expenses," while setting above profit the meaning of altruism and employee happiness; and with hard cases such as Kyocera's never a loss and JAL's resurrection, it demonstrated that morality is no ornament of management but competitiveness itself.[s33][s40] For a community that lacked a native tradition of business ethics and was anxious to find certainty, this "operable philosophy of mind," coming from within the same East Asian cultural sphere, filled a large spiritual vacancy.[s35][s36]

At the end of 2019 Seiwajuku announced its closure in Japan proper; Inamori said at the time that he was nearly ninety and lacked the strength to preside over study as he once had.[s3][s35] But the spread of the ideas never stopped: in China, Seiwajuku study platforms across the country had already gathered tens of thousands of entrepreneur-students, and the annual grand report meetings on the enterprise practice of Inamori management studies were held on a large scale, with the seventeenth convention in Taiyuan in 2025 drawing more than 5,000 managers.[s35][s36] After Inamori's death in August 2022, a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly affirmed his contributions to China-Japan friendship and exchange, and Chinese media and internet users spontaneously mourned him on a large scale.[s10][s14]

Naturally, amid the fervor there were cooler voices as well. Some pointed out that the success of Inamori philosophy in Japanese companies is deeply embedded in the institutional soil of lifetime employment, seniority-based wages and collectivism; strip those premises away, and the mere recitation of philosophy maxims at morning meetings cannot produce amoeba-style cohesion.[s29][s15] Others warned that the training, consulting and publishing industry chain built around the "Inamori boom" tended to reduce complex thought to success-school slogans.[s14] But these very controversies attest to the vitality of Inamori's legacy: a person not worth taking seriously does not provoke serious argument.

On August 30, 2022, the Asahi Shimbun wrote in its obituary editorial that by founding KDDI Inamori had driven not only the fall of domestic long-distance telephone charges in Japan but also the spread of mobile phones.[s10] The Yomiuri Shimbun assessed him as "known as the businessman who symbolized postwar Japan, who poured his energies into cultivating entrepreneurs and advancing science and culture."[s14] Hideo Tanimoto, president of Kyocera, Takashi Tanaka, chairman of KDDI, and Japan Airlines successively issued memorial statements, expressing gratitude for the management philosophy he left behind, "anchored on the criterion of what is right as a human being."[s10] That after a man's death the companies he founded still run, the prize he established is still awarded, his books are still turned by millions, and his creed has been carved by a foreign land's university into its school motto - that is perhaps the most concrete meaning of the four characters, the sage of management.

## 卷尾 Editorial Conclusion

回望稻盛和夫一生，镁橄榄石陶瓷的千百次烧制、单位时间核算表的逐行推演、日航数千条管理制度的逐条修订——所有被后世称为"哲学"的东西，最初都生长在这些枯燥、具体、不容敷衍的现场劳作之中。利他不是挂在墙上的训诫，而是一次次订单取舍中优先把员工与客户置于个人得失之前；完美主义不是口号，而是陶瓷烧结中对每一个参数偏差的零容忍。宏大的经营理念，全部扎根在细碎而严谨的日常工作里。

稻盛一生的事功，可以清晰地分为"术"与"道"两层。阿米巴核算、会计七原则、经营十二条，是可被学习、移植、检验的管理工具，属于"术"；而"作为人，何谓正确"的判断基准、利他之心、六项精进，是支撑一切工具不偏离方向的精神地基，属于"道"。以道驭术，以术证道，这是他与一般管理学者的根本分野——他的理论不是写出来的，是做出来的。

自然也有质疑。有人批评阿米巴核算过细会助长部门本位，有人认为"哲学共有"在跨文化移植中容易变形为精神教化。张瑞敏对这套体系本土化边界的反思，大量企业照搬模式却收效甚微的现实，都在提醒后来者：稻盛的价值，不在于一套可以直接复制的管理药方，而在于一套向内审视的思考范式。制度可以学，哲学背后的人心与现场，才是最难复制的部分。

商业世界永远在追逐新工具、新赛道、新风口，周期轮转，浪潮更迭，许多流行的方法论转瞬便被遗忘。而稻盛和夫留给世界的遗产，是提醒所有经营者：经营的根本，终究绕不开人的本心。时代可以提供机遇，资本可以放大成果，但长久的事业，依然要靠日复一日严谨务实的劳作去托举。

这份列传，便是对一段厚重经营实践的归档。它既是一位日本实业家的个人史，也是现代商业伦理一次重要的探索样本，供后来者观察、思辨，而非盲从。

——亚洲封面人物总编辑部

At 8:25 on the morning of August 24, 2022, Kazuo Inamori died of old age at his home in Kyoto, at ninety. In accordance with his wishes, his family declined all offerings of flowers and incense and all messages of condolence.[s6] Takashi Tanaka, chairman of KDDI, said that "a management philosophy anchored on the criterion of 'what is right as a human being' is an irreplaceable treasure"; a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs affirmed his contributions to the friendship, exchange and cooperation between China and Japan; and the more than eleven million followers of his Chinese-language microblog posted message after message of mourning.[s10][s12][s14]

History can now deliver its verdict. Kazuo Inamori accomplished three great things in his life: he founded Kyocera, he founded KDDI, and he rebuilt Japan Airlines. Kyocera has never posted an annual loss since its listing in 1971; from sales of 26 million yen in its first year, the group grew six decades later to annual sales of more than 2 trillion yen.[s9][s37] JAL moved from an operating loss of 133.7 billion yen to a profit of 188.4 billion yen in the second year of reconstruction, and to a profit margin of 17 percent in the third - in fewer than three fiscal years.[s4][s7] Yet Inamori insisted again and again that the numbers were only results, and that behind those results stood the correct code of human conduct, carried out day after day. His true legacy is a complete way of management that can be learned, transplanted and tested: the amoeba accounts, the measure of value added per hour, and the Seven Principles of Accounting belong to technique; the criterion of "what is right as a human being," the altruistic heart and the Six Disciplines belong to the Way. To govern technique with the Way, and to verify the Way through technique - that is the fundamental divide between him and the ordinary run of management gurus.[s33][s42]

There are, naturally, skeptics. Some critics argue that amoeba accounting, pushed too fine, breeds departmental parochialism; others sneer that "shared philosophy" comes close to spiritual indoctrination.[s14][s34] Zhang Ruimin, too, has said publicly that amoeba management relies chiefly on spiritual incentives and offers no material rewards, and that at bottom it remains an "upright triangle" in which the lower ranks obey the ranks above; copied wholesale into China, he warned, it would suffer from climate and soil.[s29][s50] These very criticisms make the point that Inamori's philosophy is no prescription to be swallowed thoughtlessly: it demands that the leader first cleanse his own self-interest before he begins to design mechanisms.

Set against a longer scale of time, Inamori was answering one of the permanent puzzles of modern business: for what, in the end, does a company exist? Shareholder supremacy, the worship of scale and short-term arbitrage have dragged the global economy into crisis time and again; the answer his ninety years gave is almost classical - management is the projection of the heart and mind, self-interest lets you survive but altruism lets you endure, and the workplace is itself a dojo of self-cultivation.[s40][s41] Such language may have seemed pedantic in the Japan of the 1980s, but after the financial crisis it was reread hungrily by Chinese entrepreneurs: although Seiwajuku closed at the end of 2019, study platforms across China still count tens of thousands of entrepreneur-students;[s35][s36] A Compass to Fulfillment has been reissued dozens of times in Japan and sold in the millions of copies in China, while The True Meaning of Work and Heart remain perennially on the shelves.[s40][s43] The year he took his vows at Empuku-ji Temple, the Zen master Tansetsu Nishikata told him: "Return to the real world and contribute to society - that is your Buddhist path."[s8] The twenty-five years that followed were lived precisely according to those words - lecturing and studying with his followers until the final session of Seiwajuku, writing books until Heart, his closing testament at eighty-eight, and teaching thousands upon thousands of managers the "essence of the altruistic heart" that a cleaning woman's 500-yen coin, pressed into his alms bowl on a begging round, had taught him.[s21][s46] A person's most enduring monument is never a bronze statue; it is the hearts and institutions he has changed. From the consumptive Kagoshima boy who sold paper bags, to the seventy-eight-year-old chairman who marched out to war for no pay, Kazuo Inamori proved with a single life that by carrying through, in the right way, the right things a human being ought to do, an ordinary person can walk the most extraordinary of management roads. That is the testament he left to the business world, and it is precisely what this column most wishes to hand down to posterity.

## 金句 Pull Quote

> 虽然现在我们只能租仓库进行创业，但将来我们一定会成为原町第一；成了原町第一，就瞄准西京第一；接下来是京都第一、日本第一；成了日本第一，我们定要做世界第一。

> "Right now all we can do is start our venture in a rented warehouse, but one day we will surely be number one in Haramachi; once we are number one in Haramachi, we will aim for number one in Saikyo; after that comes number one in Kyoto and number one in Japan; and once we are number one in Japan, we are determined to be number one in the world."

## 履历时间线 Career Timeline

- **1932-01** 出生于鹿儿岛药师町 / Born in Yakushi-cho, Kagoshima
  - 1932年1月出生于日本鹿儿岛市药师町（现城西）一个经营印刷作坊的家庭，兄弟姐妹七人，排行第二，家境清贫。鹿儿岛为旧萨摩藩故地，盛行重视坚韧与信义的“乡中教育”。[s3]鹿儿岛为旧萨摩藩故地，西乡隆盛、大久保利通的故乡，当地“乡中教育”以习武读书、磨砺胆气著称，这一传统深刻塑造了他坚韧重义的性格。[s20]其出生月日官方档案记为1月30日[s2]。
  - EN: In January 1932 he was born into a household that ran a small printing workshop in Yakushi-cho (today's Josai district) of Kagoshima City, the second of seven siblings, and the family was poor. Kagoshima was the old domain of Satsuma, where the goju education that prized toughness and integrity was widely practiced.[s3] Kagoshima was the old domain of Satsuma and the hometown of Saigo Takamori and Okubo Toshimichi; its goju education, with its martial training, book learning and cultivation of nerve and resolve, shaped his tough, righteous character in lasting fashion.[s20] His exact date of birth is recorded in official archives as January 30.[s2]
- **1944** 报考一中落第、染上肺结核 / Fails exam; contracts tuberculosis
  - 1944年报考鹿儿岛第一中学失败，入读国民学校高等科；同年染上浸润性肺结核，被迫长期卧床。病榻上读到邻居赠送的《生命的真相》，初次体认“内心状态影响人生境遇”的道理。[s3]他的叔父叔母均因肺结核去世，家中设临时隔离区，少年稻盛在恐惧中屏息绕行，偏偏是谨慎的他染病——这段生死边缘的经历，日后被他视为“心相”哲学的源头。[s20]
  - EN: In 1944 he failed the entrance examination for First Kagoshima Junior High School and enrolled instead in a national post-elementary school; that same year he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and was confined to his bed for a long period. On his sickbed he read The Truth of Life, lent him by a neighbor, and first grasped the idea that the state of one's mind shapes the circumstances of one's life.[s3] His uncle and aunt had both died of tuberculosis and the house had a makeshift isolation area; the young Inamori held his breath and edged past in terror, yet it was the careful, fearful one who fell ill - and this life-and-death experience he later regarded as the wellspring of his philosophy of mind.[s20]
- **1945** 空袭毁家、升入鹿儿岛中学 / Home destroyed; enters junior high
  - 1945年，战争末期的空袭烧毁了稻盛家的房屋与印刷作坊。肺结核痊愈后，他升入私立鹿儿岛中学。战后废墟中的困顿，构成其少年时代最深的底色。少年时代的他由此早早体会到家国破碎与生计维艰，也让他在日后格外珍惜安定经营、不轻易抛弃员工的理念。[s20]
  - EN: In 1945, the air raids of the war's final months burned down the Inamori family's house and its printing workshop. After his tuberculosis healed, he went on to the private Kagoshima Junior High School. The hardship amid the postwar ruins forms the deepest base color of his boyhood. From it he learned early what it meant for a country and a family to be broken and for a living to be hard won, and in later years he set a correspondingly high value on stable management and on never lightly abandoning his employees.[s20]
- **1948** 升入高中、开始行商卖纸袋 / Enters high school; peddles paper bags
  - 1948年升入鹿儿岛市高等学校第三部（现鹿儿岛玉龙高等学校）。为贴补家用，16岁的他把家中作坊印制的纸袋捆在自行车上走街串巷推销，摸索出分区铺货的土办法，几近垄断鹿儿岛中学生的纸袋生意。[s3][s20]
  - EN: In 1948 he advanced to the Third District Kagoshima Senior High School, today's Kagoshima Gyokuryu Senior High School. To help support the household, the sixteen-year-old strapped the paper bags printed by his family's workshop onto a bicycle and took to the streets to sell them, working out for himself the homespun method of laying out goods district by district until he had nearly cornered the paper-bag business among Kagoshima's middle-school students.[s3][s20]
- **1951** 考入鹿儿岛大学工学部 / Enrolls at Kagoshima University
  - 两次报考名校落榜后，1951年考入鹿儿岛大学工学部应用化学专业，专攻无机化学（陶瓷方向），毕业论文研究高岭土耐热性。大学期间靠打工与接济苦读，成绩优异。[s1][s3]在校期间他把几乎全部精力投入学业，尤其痴迷新兴的陶瓷材料，为日后进入精密陶瓷领域打下专业基础。[s20]
  - EN: After twice failing the examinations for elite schools, he was admitted in 1951 to the Faculty of Engineering, Department of Applied Chemistry, at Kagoshima University, where he specialized in inorganic chemistry, the ceramics track, and wrote his graduation thesis on the heat resistance of kaolin clay. He studied hard through part-time jobs and a meager allowance, with excellent grades.[s1][s3] At university he poured almost all of his energy into his studies and was especially captivated by the then-new ceramic materials, laying the professional groundwork for his later entry into the field of precision ceramics.[s20]
- **1955-04** 入职松风工业 / Joins Shofu Industries
  - 1955年4月从鹿儿岛大学毕业，恰逢经济萧条就业困难，经大学教授介绍进入京都绝缘子制造商松风工业，从事特殊陶瓷（新型陶瓷）研究。公司经营恶化、工资迟发，同期大学生半年内相继离职。[s1][s3][s11]
  - EN: He graduated from Kagoshima University in April 1955, into a recession in which jobs were hard to find, and through a professor's introduction joined Shofu Industries, a Kyoto manufacturer of insulators, to research special ceramics, the new ceramics. The company's business was deteriorating and wages were paid late, and the other university graduates hired the same year left one after another within half a year.[s1][s3][s11]
- **1956** 日本首次合成镁橄榄石 / First in Japan to synthesize forsterite
  - 把被褥搬进研究室日夜攻关，1956年在日本首次成功合成镁橄榄石陶瓷，并据此开发出供松下电子工业使用的U型绝缘陶瓷部件，为濒临倒闭的松风工业赢得宝贵订单。[s20]这一成果让摇摇欲坠的松风工业拿到松下电子工业的电视机显像管部件订单，也让24岁的稻盛第一次体认“全力以赴、神佛相助”的道理。[s11]
  - EN: He moved his bedding into the research room and worked day and night on the problem, and in 1956 he became the first in Japan to synthesize forsterite ceramics successfully, on the basis of which he developed U-shaped insulating ceramic components for Matsushita Electronics Industrial, winning precious orders for the failing Shofu Industries.[s20] The achievement brought the tottering company the order for television cathode-ray tube components from Matsushita Electronics Industrial, and it let the twenty-four-year-old Inamori grasp for the first time the truth that when you give it everything you have, the gods and buddhas lend their aid.[s11]
- **1958** 辞职、成婚、筹备新公司 / Resigns, marries, prepares new company
  - 1958年因技术开发方针与新任技术部长发生分歧而辞职；同年与松风工业同事须永朝子结婚。在上司青山政次及西枝一江、交川有等人出资、西枝以房产抵押贷款的支持下，决意创办新公司。[s20]西枝一江甚至以自家房产作抵押向银行贷款1000万日元充作设备投资，这份信任成为稻盛日后反复强调“不辜负出资人”的由来。[s24]
  - EN: In 1958 he resigned after falling into disagreement with the new technical director over technology development policy; that same year he married Asako Sunaga, his colleague from Shofu Industries. With investment from his supervisor Masaji Aoyama and from Ichie Nishieda and Tamotsu Majikawa, and with Nishieda raising a mortgage loan against his own house, he resolved to found a new company.[s20] Nishieda even mortgaged his home to borrow 10 million yen from the bank for equipment investment, and that trust became the source of Inamori's later, repeated insistence on never letting down the people who fund you.[s24]
- **1959-04-01** 创办京都陶瓷（京瓷） / Founds Kyoto Ceramic (Kyocera)
  - 1959年4月1日，27岁的稻盛和夫与7名同伴以资本金300万日元创办京都陶瓷株式会社（现京瓷），含本人共28名员工。创业前众人割指按血印立誓“团结一致，成就利国利民的事业”；他在成立宴会上立誓从“原町第一”做到“世界第一”。[s3][s11][s37]
  - EN: On April 1, 1959, the twenty-seven-year-old Kazuo Inamori and seven companions founded Kyoto Ceramic Co., Ltd., today's Kyocera, with capital of 3 million yen and twenty-eight employees including himself. Before the founding the group cut their fingers and pressed blood seals, vowing to stand united and accomplish an enterprise that served the nation and its people; at the founding banquet he vowed to climb from number one in Haramachi all the way to number one in the world.[s3][s11][s37]
- **1961** 员工对峙事件催生经营理念 / Employee confrontation sparks management rationale
  - 1961年，一批高中学历员工集体提出加薪奖金等强硬要求、威胁罢工。稻盛将他们邀至住处彻夜长谈，以诚意化解对峙。此事促使他反思企业目的，意识到公司不能只为实现个人技术梦想而存在。稻盛把他们邀到住处彻夜长谈，最终以诚意化解对峙，并由此意识到企业必须有超越个人野心、能让员工托付一生的大义名分。[s20]
  - EN: In 1961 a group of high-school-educated employees collectively put forward hard demands for pay raises and bonuses and threatened a strike. Inamori invited them to his lodgings and talked through the night, and his sincerity dissolved the confrontation. The episode prompted him to reflect on the purpose of the company, and he realized that it could not exist merely to realize his own technical dream. He invited them to his lodgings for an all-night talk and in the end dissolved the standoff through sincerity, coming to see that an enterprise must possess a noble cause above personal ambition, one to which employees could entrust their entire lives.[s20]
- **1966** 就任京瓷社长 / Becomes president of Kyoto Ceramic
  - 1966年，34岁的稻盛和夫就任京都陶瓷株式会社社长。此前他带领公司拿下美国IBM大型计算机用陶瓷基板订单，初期大量产品因精度不达标被退回，经住厂攻关终获稳定供货，“京瓷制造”由此获得国际信任背书。[s20][s3][s14]
  - EN: In 1966, at thirty-four, Kazuo Inamori became president of Kyoto Ceramic Co., Ltd. He had already led the company to win the order for ceramic substrates for American IBM mainframe computers; the first products were returned in large quantities for failing to meet precision standards, and after living at the plant to crack the problem he achieved stable supply, through which Kyocera-made goods won their international trust and endorsement.[s20][s3][s14]
- **1967** 确立京瓷经营理念 / Formalizes Kyocera management rationale
  - 1967年正式将经营理念确定为“追求全体员工物质与精神两方面幸福的同时，为人类和社会的进步与发展做出贡献”。“员工第一”的排序此后被带到KDDI与日航，成为其经营哲学的根基。[s20]这一理念后来被他原封不动带到KDDI与日航，“员工第一、客户第二、股东最后”的排序贯穿其整个经营生涯。[s24]
  - EN: In 1967 he formally fixed the management rationale as pursuing the material and spiritual happiness of all employees while contributing to the progress and development of humankind and society. The employee-first ordering was later carried into KDDI and Japan Airlines, becoming the root of his management philosophy.[s20] The rationale was later taken by him word for word into KDDI and Japan Airlines, and the ordering of employees first, customers second, shareholders last ran through his entire career in management.[s24]
- **1969** 建成川内工厂、赴美设法人 / Sendai plant; U.S. subsidiary
  - 1969年新建鹿儿岛川内工厂，成功量产IC用陶瓷多层封装；同年在美国成立当地法人KYOCERA International, Inc.，开启京瓷的国际化布局。[s20]IC陶瓷多层封装此后成为京瓷的拳头产品，为半导体产业起飞提供了关键基础元件。[s23]
  - EN: In 1969 the new Kagoshima Sendai Plant was completed and began mass production of multilayer ceramic packages for integrated circuits; that same year the local American subsidiary KYOCERA International, Inc. was established, opening Kyocera's international layout.[s20] Ceramic multilayer packages for ICs thereafter became Kyocera's signature product, supplying key base components for the takeoff of the semiconductor industry.[s23]
- **1971-10** 京瓷股票上市 / Kyocera shares listed
  - 1971年10月，京瓷股票在大阪证券交易所第二部及京都证券交易所上市，1972年9月转至东京证券交易所。上市后京瓷长期保持无年度亏损的纪录，1972年凭IC陶瓷多层封装技术获第18届大河内纪念生产特别奖。[s37][s23]
  - EN: In October 1971 Kyocera's shares were listed on the second section of the Osaka Stock Exchange and on the Kyoto Securities Exchange, and in September 1972 the listing moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. After going public Kyocera long maintained a record of no annual loss, and in 1972 its multilayer ceramic package technology for ICs won the 18th Okochi Memorial Production Special Prize.[s37][s23]
- **1973** 石油危机中力保就业 / Protects employment through oil crisis
  - 1973年第一次石油危机爆发，京瓷订单骤降至高峰时的十分之一。稻盛公开承诺力保就业，同时削减管理人员工资、与工会协商暂停加薪，全员开展销售与新产品开发；经济回暖后加倍补偿员工，企业体质反获增强。[s22]
  - EN: The first oil crisis struck in 1973, and Kyocera's orders plunged to a tenth of their peak. Inamori publicly pledged to protect employment while cutting managers' salaries and negotiating with the union to suspend pay raises, and the whole workforce turned out for sales and new-product development; once the economy recovered he compensated the employees twofold, and the company's constitution emerged strengthened rather than weakened.[s22]
- **1975** 合资进军太阳能电池 / Venture into solar cells
  - 1975年，京瓷与松下、夏普、美孚石油、泰科实验室等合资成立日本太阳能株式会社（JSEC），开始太阳电池开发，成为全球最早布局光伏产业的企业之一。这一布局比全球光伏产业的爆发早了三十多年，体现了他围绕“材料—能源”能力链做长期投入的远见。[s23]
  - EN: In 1975 Kyocera joined with Matsushita, Sharp, Mobil Oil, Tyco Laboratories and others to establish Japan Solar Energy Corporation, JSEC, and began developing solar cells, becoming one of the earliest companies anywhere to lay out the photovoltaic industry. The move came more than three decades before the global solar boom and reflected his foresight in making long-term investments along the materials-energy capability chain.[s23]
- **1982** 更名为京瓷株式会社 / Renamed Kyocera Corporation
  - 1979年至1982年间，Trident电子仪器、Cybernet通讯器材等公司相继并入京瓷集团；1982年公司更名为“京瓷株式会社”，由单一陶瓷厂成长为综合性电子集团。多元化始终围绕精密陶瓷相关技术自然延伸，而非追逐投机热点，这也是京瓷长期稳健的重要原因。[s23]
  - EN: Between 1979 and 1982 companies including Trident's electronic-instruments business and Cybernet's communications-equipment business successively merged into the Kyocera group, and in 1982 the company changed its name to Kyocera Corporation, growing from a single ceramics plant into a comprehensive electronics group. Its diversification always extended naturally from technologies related to precision ceramics rather than chasing speculative fads, an important reason for Kyocera's long-run steadiness.[s23]
- **1983** 创办盛友塾（盛和塾） / Founds Seiyujyuku (later Seiwajuku)
  - 1983年，在众多中小企业经营者恳求下，稻盛和夫创办企业家学习组织“盛友塾”（1989年更名“盛和塾”），志愿担任塾长，分文不取地传授经营知识与哲学。至2019年底关闭时，全球共104家分塾、塾生约1.5万人。[s3][s1]
  - EN: In 1983, at the earnest entreaty of numerous managers of small and medium enterprises, Kazuo Inamori founded the entrepreneurs' learning organization Seiyujyuku, renamed Seiwajyuku in 1989, serving as its head on a volunteer basis and imparting management knowledge and philosophy without taking a single yen. By the time it closed at the end of 2019, it had 104 branches worldwide and roughly 15,000 members.[s3][s1]
- **1984-06** 创办第二电电（DDI） / Founds Daini-Denden (DDI)
  - 借日本电信自由化之机，1984年6月创办第二电电企画株式会社（DDI）并就任会长，挑战NTT垄断。入局前他半年每晚自问“动机是否至善、私心是否了无”，且个人不持一股。DDI在三家新进入者中业绩最优，推动了日本长途话费下降。[s3][s11][s10]
  - EN: Taking the opportunity of Japan's telecommunications liberalization, he founded Daini-Denden Planning Co., Ltd., DDI, in June 1984 and took office as chairman, challenging the NTT monopoly. Before entering the market he spent half a year asking himself every night whether his motive was wholly good and his self-interest utterly erased, and he held not a single personal share. Of the three new entrants, DDI turned in the best performance and drove down Japan's long-distance telephone charges.[s3][s11][s10]
- **1984** 设立稻盛财团与京都奖 / Establishes Inamori Foundation, Kyoto Prize
  - 1984年投入个人财产设立公益财团法人稻盛财团，1985年创设国际奖项“京都奖”，每年表彰尖端技术、基础科学、思想与艺术领域的卓越贡献者。他捐赠约200亿日元现金及京瓷股票，京都奖被誉为“日本的诺贝尔奖”。[s3][s25][s26]
  - EN: In 1984 he invested his personal assets to establish the Inamori Foundation as a public-interest incorporated foundation, and in 1985 created the international Kyoto Prize, honoring each year those who had made outstanding contributions in advanced technology, the basic sciences, and thought and the arts. He donated some 20 billion yen in cash together with Kyocera shares, and the Kyoto Prize came to be praised as Japan's Nobel Prize.[s3][s25][s26]
- **1989** 收购美国AVX公司 / Acquires AVX of the United States
  - 1989年，京瓷收购美国电子元件制造商AVX公司。谈判中稻盛尊重对方股东利益、做出价格让步，以“利他”方式促成罕见的长期双赢跨文化并购，AVX后发展为京瓷全球电子元件业务的重要支柱。他在谈判中尊重对方股东诉求、主动做出价格让步，被视为“利他经营”在国际并购中的经典案例。[s31]
  - EN: In 1989 Kyocera acquired the American electronic-components manufacturer AVX. During the negotiations Inamori respected the interests of the other side's shareholders and made price concessions, bringing about a rare cross-cultural merger that achieved a long-term win for both sides through altruistic management, and AVX later developed into an important pillar of Kyocera's global electronic-components business. His respect for the shareholders' demands and his voluntary price concessions came to be regarded as a classic case of altruistic management in international mergers.[s31]
- **1997-09-07** 确诊胃癌、圆福寺出家 / Cancer diagnosed; ordination at Empuku-ji
  - 1997年从经营一线引退后不久确诊胃癌，手术切除三分之二的胃。9月7日在京都八幡圆福寺接受出家仪式，皈依临济宗妙心寺派，法号“大和”，并进行坐禅与托钵修行。西片担雪禅师开示他“回归社会做贡献就是你的佛道”。[s8][s20]
  - EN: Shortly after retiring from front-line management in 1997, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer, and surgery removed two-thirds of his stomach. On September 7 he received the ordination rites at Empuku-ji Temple in Yawata, Kyoto, took refuge in the Myoshinji school of the Rinzai Zen sect and was given the Buddhist name Daiwa, practicing zazen and alms begging. The Zen master Tansetsu Nishikata instructed him that to return to society and contribute was the Buddhist path he ought to follow.[s8][s20]
- **2000-10** 三公司合并成立KDDI / Three companies merge into KDDI
  - 2000年10月，在稻盛主导下，DDI与KDD（国际电报电话）、IDO（日本移动通信）合并成立株式会社DDI，2001年更名为KDDI株式会社，稻盛任董事名誉会长、后任最高顾问。KDDI稳居日本第二大电信运营商并跻身世界500强。[s3][s10]
  - EN: In October 2000, under Inamori's leadership, DDI merged with KDD, Kokusai Denshin Denwa in international telecommunications, and IDO, Nippon Idou Tsushin in mobile communications, to form DDI Corporation, renamed KDDI Corporation in 2001; Inamori served as chairman emeritus and later as honorary adviser. KDDI held firm as Japan's second-largest telecom carrier and entered the ranks of the Fortune Global 500.[s3][s10]
- **2001** 设立中国西部开发奖学基金 / Endows western-China scholarship fund
  - 2001年，稻盛和夫与京瓷各捐资50万美元，在中国设立“稻盛京瓷西部开发奖学基金”，每年资助中国西部地区约360名大学生。此后他多次访华，2004年获中日友好协会授予“中日友好使者”称号。[s20][s14]
  - EN: In 2001 Kazuo Inamori and Kyocera each contributed 500,000 dollars to establish the Inamori-Kyocera Western Development Scholarship Fund in China, which each year supports some 360 university students in China's western regions. He visited China many times thereafter, and in 2004 the China-Japan Friendship Association conferred on him the title of Envoy of Sino-Japanese Friendship.[s20][s14]
- **2010-01-19** 日本航空申请破产保护 / Japan Airlines files for bankruptcy
  - 2010年1月19日，日本航空公司依据《会社更生法》向东京地方法院申请破产保护，负债总额2.32万亿日元（约255亿美元），为日本战后最大公司破产案，股票2月20日从东交所摘牌。[s31]由政府支持的企业再生支援机构主导重组，舆论普遍认为日航“重建不可能”，必将二次破产。[s32]
  - EN: On January 19, 2010, Japan Airlines filed for protection under the Corporate Reorganization Act with the Tokyo District Court, with total liabilities of 2.32 trillion yen, about 25.5 billion dollars, the largest corporate bankruptcy in postwar Japan, and its shares were delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange on February 20.[s31] The government-backed Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corporation led the restructuring, while public opinion widely held JAL's reconstruction to be impossible and predicted a certain second bankruptcy.[s32]
- **2010-02** 78岁零薪酬就任日航会长 / Zero-salary JAL chairman at seventy-eight
  - 应日本政府再三邀请，78岁的稻盛和夫2010年2月就任日本航空会长，宣布不领取任何报酬。他出于防止冲击日本经济、保障留任员工就业、维护航空业公平竞争三项大义接受挑战，随即推行哲学教育与阿米巴核算。[s1][s7][s13]
  - EN: At the Japanese government's repeated invitation, the seventy-eight-year-old Kazuo Inamori took office as chairman of Japan Airlines in February 2010 and announced that he would draw no remuneration whatever. He accepted the challenge for three great causes - preventing a shock to the Japanese economy, guaranteeing the jobs of the employees who stayed, and maintaining fair competition in the airline industry - and immediately set about philosophical education and amoeba accounting.[s1][s7][s13]
- **2012-03** 日航重建第二年盈利1884亿日元 / JAL second-year profit record
  - 截至2012年3月的重建第二个财年，日航销售额1.3622万亿日元，营业利润达1884亿日元，由前一年负1337亿日元一举扭亏，成为全球盈利能力最高的大型航空公司之一；第三个财年营业利润进一步升至2049亿日元，利润率17%。[s4][s7]
  - EN: In the second fiscal year of reconstruction, ending March 2012, JAL posted sales of 1.3622 trillion yen and operating profit of 188.4 billion yen, swinging in a single stroke from the previous year's operating loss of 133.7 billion yen to become one of the world's most profitable large airlines; in the third fiscal year operating profit rose further to 204.9 billion yen, a profit margin of 17 percent.[s4][s7]
- **2012-09-19** 日航重新上市 / Japan Airlines relisted
  - 2012年9月19日，日本航空在退市仅两年零七个月后于东京证券交易所重新上市，创下日本破产企业重组后最快重新上市纪录。稻盛于2012年2月转任名誉会长，2013年退出经营前线。[s7]日航由此成为全球大型航空公司中盈利能力最高的企业之一，这场重建被视为稻盛经营哲学最有力的一次实证。[s10]
  - EN: On September 19, 2012, Japan Airlines relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange just two years and seven months after delisting, setting the fastest record in Japan for a bankrupt company to relist after reorganization. Inamori became chairman emeritus in February 2012 and left the front line of management in 2013.[s7] JAL thereby became one of the most profitable of the world's large airlines, and the reconstruction came to be regarded as the most powerful empirical demonstration of Inamori's management philosophy.[s10]
- **2019** 盛和塾关闭、获KBE勋章 / Seiwajuku closes; awarded honorary KBE
  - 2019年底，因年事已高，稻盛和夫主持的盛和塾在举办最后一届世界大会后宣告关闭，三十余年间全球累计塾生约1.5万人。同年他荣获英国名誉大英帝国勋章（KBE）。[s3]同年他荣获英国名誉大英帝国勋章（KBE）；盛和塾三十余载培养经营者的使命，此后主要由各国的盛和塾学习平台延续。[s14]
  - EN: At the end of 2019, because of his great age, the Seiwajuku led by Kazuo Inamori announced its closure after holding its final world convention; over more than three decades it had trained roughly 15,000 members worldwide. That same year he was awarded an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, KBE.[s3] He received the honorary KBE that same year; Seiwajuku's mission of cultivating managers across three decades and more has since been carried forward chiefly by Seiwajuku study platforms in various countries.[s14]
- **2022-08-24** 在京都家中逝世，享年90岁 / Dies in Kyoto, aged ninety
  - 2022年8月24日上午8时25分，稻盛和夫在京都市内家中因衰老辞世，享年90岁。家属遵照遗愿谢绝供花、香典与唁电。日本政商各界与中国官方、企业家群体纷纷致哀，《活法》《干法》等著作再度热销。[s6][s10][s14]
  - EN: At 8:25 on the morning of August 24, 2022, Kazuo Inamori died of old age at his home in Kyoto, at ninety. In accordance with his wishes his family declined all offerings of flowers and incense and all messages of condolence. Japanese political and business circles, Chinese officialdom and the community of Chinese entrepreneurs all expressed their grief in succession, and works such as A Compass to Fulfillment and The True Meaning of Work sold hotly once again.[s6][s10][s14]

## 常问问答 FAQ

**Q1: 稻盛和夫是谁？为什么被称为“经营之圣”？**

A: 稻盛和夫（1932年1月—2022年8月24日），日本鹿儿岛人，企业家、经营思想家。他1959年创办京都陶瓷（京瓷），1984年创办第二电电（后合并为KDDI），两家公司都跻身《财富》世界500强，使他成为世界上首位亲手创办两家世界500强的企业家；2010年又以78岁高龄零薪酬出任破产重建的日本航空会长，两年七个月带领日航重新上市[s3][s10][s14]。他在日本与松下幸之助并称“经营之神”，在中国企业界则被尊为“经营之圣”[s10]。这一尊称不仅来自商业成就，更来自他自成体系的经营哲学——“敬天爱人”“作为人，何谓正确”“阿米巴经营”“六项精进”“经营十二条”等，经由盛和塾约1.5万名塾生与《活法》《干法》等畅销书，影响了中日及全球大批经营者[s3][s14][s40]。季羡林评价他是“既是企业家又是哲学家，一身而二任”的凤毛麟角之人[s38]。他2022年8月24日在京都家中因衰老辞世，享年90岁；生前还于1984年捐出个人财产设立稻盛财团与京都奖，被誉为“日本的诺贝尔奖”，把企业家的社会责任延伸到科学与人文领域[s6][s25]。

**Q1 (EN): Who was Kazuo Inamori, and why was he called the sage of management?**

A: Kazuo Inamori (January 1932 - August 24, 2022), a native of Kagoshima, Japan, was an entrepreneur and management thinker. He founded Kyoto Ceramic, today's Kyocera, in 1959 and Daini-Denden, later merged into KDDI, in 1984; both companies entered the Fortune Global 500, making him the first entrepreneur anywhere in the world to have personally founded two Fortune Global 500 companies. In 2010, at the age of seventy-eight, he then came out of retirement to serve, for no salary, as chairman of Japan Airlines during its bankruptcy reconstruction, leading the airline to relisting in two years and seven months.[s3][s10][s14] In Japan he was ranked alongside Konosuke Matsushita as one of the gods of management, while in Chinese business circles he was revered as the sage of management.[s10] That title rested not only on his business achievements but also on his self-contained management philosophy - the maxims "revere the divine and love people" and "what is right as a human being," amoeba management, the Six Disciplines and the Twelve Management Principles - which, through the roughly 15,000 members of the Seiwajuku study circles and through bestsellers such as A Compass to Fulfillment and The True Meaning of Work, influenced great numbers of managers in China, Japan and across the world.[s3][s14][s40] The scholar Ji Xianlin assessed him as a figure "both entrepreneur and philosopher, bearing the two callings in a single person," rarer than the phoenix's feather.[s38] He died of old age at his home in Kyoto on August 24, 2022, at ninety; during his lifetime he had also donated his personal assets in 1984 to establish the Inamori Foundation and the Kyoto Prize, praised as Japan's Nobel Prize, extending the entrepreneur's social responsibility into the realms of science and the humanities.[s6][s25]

**Q2: 什么是阿米巴经营？它如何运作？**

A: 阿米巴经营是稻盛和夫独创的管理会计与组织模式，得名于能随环境变形的阿米巴虫（变形虫）。其核心是把企业细分成许多个名为“阿米巴”的独立核算小单元（通常五到十人，对应一道工序或一个产品环节），每个单元的负责人像经营者一样自主制定计划、控制成本、追求利润，单元业绩通过“单位时间核算表”呈现——用销售额减经费得出附加值，再除以总劳动时间，算出每小时创造的价值[s22][s33]。全部经营数字向单元成员公开，即“玻璃般透明的经营”，从而让一线员工从被动执行者变成主动算账的“经营者”，实现“全员参与经营”[s22][s42]。稻盛特别强调，阿米巴不能脱离“哲学共有”单独使用：小单元若只追求自身核算最优会滋生本位主义，必须靠“作为人，何谓正确”“利他”等共同价值观来协调单元间的内部定价与协作[s7][s15]。日航重建时，正是依靠按航线、航班建立核算机制加《日航哲学》双管齐下，才让全员成本意识迅速觉醒[s7]。

**Q2 (EN): What is amoeba management, and how does it work?**

A: Amoeba management is the management-accounting and organizational model created by Kazuo Inamori, named after the amoeba, the organism that can reshape itself with its environment. Its core is to subdivide the enterprise into many small self-accounting units called amoebas, usually five to ten people each, corresponding to a single process or a single product link; the leader of each unit, like a manager, draws up plans, controls costs and pursues profit on his own initiative, and the unit's performance is displayed on the unit-time accounting sheet, which subtracts expenses from sales to obtain value added and then divides by total labor hours to compute the value created each hour.[s22][s33] All operating numbers are disclosed to the unit's members - the so-called glass-clear, transparent management - so that frontline employees turn from passive executors into managers who keep their own accounts, achieving all-member participation in management.[s22][s42] Inamori laid particular stress on the point that amoeba management cannot be used in isolation from shared philosophy: if the small units pursue only the optimum of their own accounts, departmental parochialism will breed, and the shared values of "what is right as a human being" and altruism are required to coordinate internal pricing and cooperation among the units.[s7][s15] During the Japan Airlines reconstruction, it was precisely the combination of an accounting mechanism built route by route and flight by flight with the JAL Philosophy, applied together, that rapidly awakened cost awareness throughout the workforce.[s7]

**Q3: 日本航空是怎么被稻盛和夫救活的？**

A: 2010年1月19日，日本航空以2.32万亿日元负债申请破产保护，是日本战后最大公司破产案[s31][s32]。78岁的稻盛和夫应日本政府邀请，于2010年2月零薪酬出任会长。他的重建不是先裁员砍航线，而是先“救人心”：上任即宣布日航经营目的是“追求全体员工物质和精神两方面的幸福”；2010年6月起召集约50名干部分17次培训，讲“作为人、作为领导人应该怎么做”，并亲赴羽田、成田机场向一线员工讲述服务的意义；同时编制《日航哲学》统一价值观[s7][s13]。制度上，他导入阿米巴式管理会计，建立每条航线、每个航班的收支核算机制，设航线负责人，每月开业绩报告会，让盈亏完全透明[s7]。重组中员工规模也缩减约1.6万人（约占三分之一）[s10]。结果：重建前一年日航营业利润为负1337亿日元，第二年（截至2012年3月）即实现营业利润1884亿日元，第三年达2049亿日元、利润率17%；2012年9月19日退市仅两年七个月后重新上市[s4][s7]。稻盛把成功归因于零薪酬的感召、三项大义的使命感、员工幸福的理念与彻底的干部教育，而非经营技巧[s13]。

**Q3 (EN): How did Kazuo Inamori save Japan Airlines?**

A: On January 19, 2010, Japan Airlines filed for bankruptcy protection with 2.32 trillion yen in liabilities, one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in postwar Japan.[s31][s32] At the invitation of the Japanese government, the seventy-eight-year-old Kazuo Inamori took office as chairman in February 2010 for no salary. His reconstruction did not begin with layoffs and route cuts but with saving the human heart: on taking office he declared that the purpose of JAL's management was "to pursue the material and spiritual happiness of all employees"; from June 2010 he gathered roughly fifty executives for seventeen training sessions on how one ought to act as a human being and as a leader, and went in person to Haneda and Narita airports to tell frontline staff the meaning of service, while compiling the JAL Philosophy to unify values.[s7][s13] Institutionally, he imported amoeba-style management accounting, built a mechanism for tracking the income and outgo of every route and every flight, appointed route heads, and held monthly results meetings so that profit and loss were entirely transparent.[s7] The restructuring also reduced the workforce by some 16,000 people, about a third.[s10] The result: in the year before reconstruction JAL posted an operating loss of 133.7 billion yen; in the second year, ending March 2012, it achieved operating profit of 188.4 billion yen, and in the third year 204.9 billion yen with a 17 percent profit margin; on September 19, 2012, just two years and seven months after delisting, it relisted.[s4][s7] Inamori attributed the success not to management techniques but to the drawing power of zero salary, the sense of mission given by the three great causes, the rationale of employee happiness, and the thorough philosophical education of the executives.[s13]

**Q4: “敬天爱人”和“作为人，何谓正确”是什么意思？**

A: “敬天爱人”是稻盛和夫的座右铭，取自他同乡、明治维新志士西乡隆盛。“敬天”指敬畏天道、顺应自然规律与道德律令，不任性妄为；“爱人”指以利他之心关爱他人——员工、客户与社会[s30][s41]。稻盛把它制成匾额挂在京瓷总部，作为企业一切决策的价值标尺。“作为人，何谓正确”则是他提出的根本判断基准：遇到任何经营或人生抉择，不问“对公司有没有好处”“对我个人有没有好处”，而是回到做人最朴素的道德——正直、诚实、不骗人、不贪婪、不偷懒——以此判断该做什么、不该做什么[s33][s14]。他认为这是超越企业与个人利害、放之四海皆准的准则，也是京瓷、KDDI、日航共同的最高行动规范[s14]。这两条理念与“利他经营”一脉相承：企业只有为客户、员工和社会创造价值，自身的成功才能长久，即“自利则生，利他则久”[s33][s41]。这一思想也体现在他著名的排序上——员工第一、客户第二、股东最后，因为“员工把一生托付给公司”，企业最重要的使命是保障员工及其家庭的幸福[s13]。

**Q4 (EN): What do revere the divine and love people and what is right as a human being mean?**

A: "Revere the divine and love people" (keiten aijin) was Kazuo Inamori's motto, taken from his fellow Kagoshima native Saigo Takamori, the Meiji Restoration patriot. "Revering the divine" means standing in awe of the way of heaven and conforming to natural law and moral imperative, rather than acting willfully; "loving people" means caring for others - employees, customers and society - with an altruistic heart.[s30][s41] Inamori had the phrase mounted on a plaque in Kyocera's headquarters as the value yardstick for every corporate decision. "What is right as a human being" is the fundamental criterion of judgment he proposed: facing any choice in management or in life, ask not whether it benefits the company or whether it benefits yourself, but return to the plainest morality of being a person - uprightness, honesty, not deceiving others, not being greedy, not shirking - and use it to decide what ought and ought not to be done.[s33][s14] He held this to be a standard that rises above the interests of company and individual and holds everywhere, and the supreme code of action common to Kyocera, KDDI and Japan Airlines.[s14] The two maxims are of one piece with altruistic management: only when a company creates value for its customers, employees and society can its own success endure - self-interest lets you survive, but altruism lets you endure.[s33][s41] The same thought is expressed in his famous ordering - employees first, customers second, shareholders last - because employees entrust their entire lives to the company, and the firm's most important mission is to safeguard the happiness of its employees and their families.[s13]

**Q5: 稻盛和夫的“六项精进”和“经营十二条”包括哪些内容？**

A: “六项精进”是稻盛和夫提出的日常修身纲领，内容为：一、付出不亚于任何人的努力；二、要谦虚，不要骄傲；三、要每天反省；四、活着，就要感谢；五、积善行，思利他；六、不要有感性的烦恼（即不要沉溺于对已发生之事的懊悔、怨恨与情绪内耗）[s14][s40]。前三条讲如何对事，后三条讲如何修心，他认为这是让人生与事业向好的最基本功夫。“经营十二条”是面向经营者的行动准则：一、明确事业的目的与意义；二、设立具体目标；三、胸中怀有强烈愿望；四、付出不亚于任何人的努力；五、追求销售最大化、经费最小化；六、定价即经营；七、经营取决于坚强的意志；八、燃烧的斗魂；九、拿出勇气做事；十、不断从事创造性的工作；十一、以关爱和诚实之心待人；十二、保持乐观向上的态度[s14][s33]。其中“定价即经营”强调定价是决定企业生死的核心决策，“销售最大化、经费最小化”则指出利润无需强求，把两头做到极致利润自然而来[s14]。此外他还提出配套财务规范“会计七原则”，如一一对应、双重确认、完美主义、肌肉型经营、玻璃般透明、现金本位等，要求经营者用清晰数字把握经营实体[s14][s33]。

**Q5 (EN): What are Inamori's Six Disciplines and Twelve Management Principles?**

A: The Six Disciplines are the daily self-cultivation program Kazuo Inamori proposed: first, exert an effort second to none; second, be humble and not proud; third, reflect every day; fourth, be grateful while you are alive; fifth, accumulate good deeds and keep the altruistic heart in mind; and sixth, do not dwell in emotional worry, meaning not to sink into regret, resentment and inner emotional exhaustion over things that have already happened.[s14][s40] The first three concern how to handle matters and the latter three how to tend the mind, and he regarded them as the most basic practice for turning life and business in a good direction. The Twelve Management Principles are the action code for managers: clearly set forth the purpose and significance of the business; set concrete goals; hold a strong desire in your breast; exert an effort second to none; pursue maximum sales and minimum expenses; pricing is management; management depends on strong will; maintain a burning fighting spirit; take action with courage; engage in creative work constantly; treat people with a caring and sincere heart; and always maintain an optimistic, upbeat attitude.[s14][s33] Among them, "pricing is management" stresses that pricing is the core decision determining the life and death of the enterprise, while "maximum sales, minimum expenses" holds that profit need not be forced, for when the two ends are pushed to their extremes profit follows of itself.[s14] In addition, he proposed the companion financial code of the Seven Principles of Accounting, including one-to-one correspondence, double checking, perfectionism, muscular management, glass-clear transparency and cash-based management, requiring managers to grasp the substance of the business through clear numbers.[s14][s33]

**Q6: 稻盛和夫的“成功方程式”是什么？**

A: 成功方程式即“人生·工作的结果＝思维方式×热情×能力”，是稻盛和夫哲学中最广为人知的公式[s14][s41]。他认为，“能力”多指天赋的智商、体魄，分值0到100；“热情”指努力的程度，也可从0到100；而“思维方式”指人的价值观、心态与人格，取值范围是从负100到正100——因为心态和价值取向有正负方向之分。三者是乘法关系而非加法：一个人若思维方式为负（自私、嫉妒、邪恶、怠惰），那么能力越强、热情越高，其结果的负值就越大，对组织和社会的破坏也越严重[s14]。因此稻盛反复强调，人格与心性比才干更重要，选人用人“人品重于才能”，企业业绩乃至寿命“全部取决于是否具有出色的思维方式”[s14][s33]。这个公式与“心不唤物，物不至”相互呼应：强烈而纯粹的愿望（正向思维）会渗透潜意识，驱动行动并吸引资源，最终把看似不可能的目标变为现实[s41]。他常举自己创办DDI前每晚自问“动机是否纯粹”的例子：正是把“思维方式”这个乘数校准为正、确认“动机至善、私心了无”之后，他才敢于以蚂蚁之躯挑战NTT巨象[s11]。

**Q6 (EN): What is Kazuo Inamori's success equation?**

A: The success equation is the formula the results of life and work equal mindset multiplied by passion multiplied by ability, the most widely known formula in Kazuo Inamori's philosophy.[s14][s41] He held that "ability" refers mostly to innate intelligence and physique, scored from 0 to 100; "passion" refers to the degree of effort, also scored from 0 to 100; whereas "mindset" refers to a person's values, frame of mind and character, and ranges from minus 100 to plus 100, because states of mind and value orientations run in positive and negative directions. The three are related by multiplication rather than addition: if a person's mindset is negative - selfish, envious, evil, indolent - then the greater his ability and the higher his passion, the larger the negative value of his result and the more serious the damage to the organization and to society.[s14] Hence Inamori stressed again and again that character and frame of mind matter more than talent; in selecting and using people, character outweighs ability, and a company's performance and even its lifespan depend entirely on whether its people possess an outstanding mindset.[s14][s33] The formula resonates with the saying that what the mind does not summon will not come: a strong and pure desire, a positive mindset, soaks into the subconscious, drives action and draws resources, in the end turning a seemingly impossible goal into reality.[s41] He often cited his own example of asking himself every night, before founding DDI, whether his motive was pure: only after calibrating this multiplier, mindset, to positive and confirming that his motive was wholly good and self-interest utterly erased did he dare, with the body of an ant, to challenge the NTT elephant.[s11]

**Q7: 稻盛和夫为什么要出家？他的胃癌后来怎样了？**

A: 稻盛和夫把人生分为三段：出生后20年是步入社会的准备期，中间40年是为社会工作的贡献期，最后20年是为“灵魂起程”（死亡）做准备的时期[s8]。1997年，65岁的他按此规划从京瓷和第二电电引退，准备出家，却在体检中确诊胃癌，手术切除了三分之二的胃；当年9月7日，身体尚未康复的他仍在京都八幡圆福寺接受出家仪式，皈依临济宗妙心寺派，法号“大和”，并进行了两个多月坐禅、托钵的修行[s8][s20]。托钵路上，一位打扫公园的清贫老妇人不假思索地把500日元硬币放进他的化缘袋，让他体认到“利他之心”不假造作的真髓[s8][s21]。西片担雪禅师开示他：出家后应回归现实社会做贡献，“这才是你应遵行的佛道”[s8]。他于是重返社会，全身心经营盛和塾、稻盛财团与京都奖，投身儿童福利等公益[s3][s25]。他当年所患胃癌经手术后未再复发，此后又活了四分之一个世纪，直至2022年90岁时因衰老自然辞世[s6][s21]。需要说明的是，稻盛出家并非避世，而是以出世之心做入世之事。

**Q7 (EN): Why did Kazuo Inamori become a Buddhist monk, and what happened to his stomach cancer?**

A: Kazuo Inamori divided life into three stages: the twenty years after birth are a period of preparation for entering society, the middle forty are a period of contribution through work for society, and the final twenty are a period of preparing for what he called the soul's departure, that is, death.[s8] In 1997, at sixty-five, he retired from Kyocera and Daini-Denden according to this plan and prepared to enter the priesthood, but a checkup diagnosed stomach cancer, and surgery removed two-thirds of his stomach; on September 7 of that year, his body not yet recovered, he nevertheless received the ordination rites at Empuku-ji Temple in Yawata, Kyoto, took refuge in the Myoshinji school of the Rinzai Zen sect, was given the Buddhist name Daiwa, and spent more than two months in zazen meditation and alms-begging practice.[s8][s20] On the alms road, an impoverished elderly woman who was sweeping a park dropped a 500-yen coin into his alms bag without a second thought, letting him experience the unfeigned essence of the altruistic heart.[s8][s21] The Zen master Tansetsu Nishikata instructed him that after ordination he should return to the real world and contribute to society, for that was the Buddhist path he ought to follow.[s8] He therefore returned to society, devoting himself to Seiwajuku, the Inamori Foundation and the Kyoto Prize and throwing himself into children's welfare and other public causes.[s3][s25] The stomach cancer of that year never recurred after surgery; he lived another quarter-century, until his death of natural causes at ninety in 2022.[s6][s21] It should be noted that Inamori's ordination was no flight from the world but a case of doing worldly things with a world-transcending heart.

**Q8: 稻盛和夫对中国企业家（张瑞敏、马云、曹德旺等）有什么影响？**

A: 稻盛和夫是改革开放后对中国企业家群体影响最深的外国经营者之一。海尔张瑞敏是最早的深入对话者：2010年稻盛访问海尔时，张瑞敏称稻盛哲学中“敬天爱人”和“阿米巴经营组织”对海尔非常重要，并感慨“我们如果早一天认识您，海尔会发展得更快”；他后来推行的“人单合一”模式与阿米巴“人人都是经营者”理念相呼应，但也清醒指出阿米巴偏精神激励、仍是“正三角”结构，不能简单照搬到中国[s15][s29]。阿里巴巴马云在2008年金融危机后和2019年交棒前两度赴日请教，2008年稻盛以“危机是神灵对人类的惩戒、要懂得知足谦虚”相告[s17][s16]；马云称“人为什么活着、企业存在的意义何在，我从稻盛经营哲学中学到了很多”[s38]。福耀曹德旺与稻盛电视对话后赞同其“企业家要追求高尚人格”，并把“敬天爱人”作为应对经营困惑的根本解答；2026年他创办的福耀科技大学将校训定为“敬天爱人，止于至善”[s27][s28]。此外王石、任正非等也公开推崇稻盛思想[s38][s16]。截至盛和塾在日本关闭，中国各地学习平台仍有数万名企业家学员，《活法》《干法》中文版销量以百万计[s35][s36][s40]。

**Q8 (EN): What influence did Kazuo Inamori have on Chinese entrepreneurs such as Zhang Ruimin, Jack Ma and Cho Dewang?**

A: Kazuo Inamori was one of the foreign managers with the deepest influence on the generation of Chinese entrepreneurs that grew up after reform and opening-up. Zhang Ruimin of Haier was among the earliest and most in-depth interlocutors: when Inamori visited Haier in 2010, Zhang said that Inamori philosophy's "revere the divine and love people" and the amoeba management organization were of the greatest importance to Haier, and lamented that had they made his acquaintance even one day earlier, Haier would have developed faster; the Rend anHeYi model he later promoted echoes the amoeba idea that everyone is a manager, yet he soberly pointed out that amoeba management leans on spiritual incentives and remains an upright-triangle structure that cannot simply be copied into China.[s15][s29] Jack Ma of Alibaba twice traveled to Japan to seek counsel, after the 2008 financial crisis and before his 2019 handover; in 2008 Inamori told him that crisis is a chastisement sent by the gods to humankind and that one must know contentment and humility,[s17][s16] and Ma said he had learned a great deal from Inamori philosophy about why people live and what a company exists for.[s38] Cho Dewang of Fuyao endorsed, after his televised dialogue with Inamori, the view that the entrepreneur must pursue a lofty character, and took "revere the divine and love people" as his fundamental answer to operating perplexities; in 2026 the Fuyao University of Science and Technology founded by him fixed its motto as "revere the divine and love people, rest in the highest excellence."[s27][s28] Others including Wang Shi and Ren Zhengfei have also publicly commended Inamori's thought.[s38][s16] By the time Seiwajuku closed in Japan, study platforms across China still had tens of thousands of entrepreneur-students, and the Chinese editions of A Compass to Fulfillment and The True Meaning of Work have sold in the millions.[s35][s36][s40]

**Q9: 稻盛和夫有哪些代表性著作？《活法》《干法》主要讲什么？**

A: 稻盛和夫著述颇丰，代表作包括《活法》《干法》《阿米巴经营》《经营为什么需要哲学》《经营十二条》《六项精进》《会计七原则》《成功方程式》《心法》《心：稻盛和夫的一生嘱托》以及《稻盛和夫自传》等[s40][s33][s43]。《活法》（2004年）是其流传最广的著作，日文版销量超130万册，核心命题是“人为什么活着”：人生的意义在于提升心性、磨练灵魂，让灵魂在离去时比到来时更纯净；书中提出“心不唤物，物不至”“作为人，何谓正确”“利他之心”等观念，主张以勤奋、诚实、谦虚、感恩等朴素德行穿越人生的顺逆[s40][s41]。《干法》（2009年）聚焦工作观，主张工作不是谋生手段而是磨练心志、提升人格的修行场，倡导“热爱工作”“付出不亚于任何人的努力”“认为不行的时候正是工作的开始”“答案在现场”[s39][s42]。《阿米巴经营》（2006年）系统阐述划小核算单元、单位时间核算与哲学共有的管理机制[s42]。2020年88岁时出版的《心》被视为收官之作，以“心”为纲统摄一生心法[s43]。这些著作少谈战略模型、多谈心性与道德，构成一套“可操作的东方人生与经营哲学”，每遇经济下行都会再度畅销[s40]。

**Q9 (EN): What are Kazuo Inamori's representative books, and what do A Compass to Fulfillment and The True Meaning of Work mainly discuss?**

A: Kazuo Inamori wrote prolifically; his representative works include A Compass to Fulfillment, The True Meaning of Work, Amoeba Management, Why Management Needs Philosophy, The Twelve Management Principles, The Six Disciplines, The Seven Principles of Accounting, The Success Equation, Mind Mastery, Heart: The Final Testament of Kazuo Inamori and his autobiography.[s40][s33][s43] A Compass to Fulfillment (2004) is his most widely read book, with Japanese sales of more than 1.3 million copies, and its central question is why human beings live: the meaning of life lies in elevating the mind and tempering the soul, so that the soul at departure is purer than at arrival; the book puts forward ideas including what the mind does not summon will not come, what is right as a human being and the altruistic heart, advocating diligence, honesty, humility and gratitude as the plain virtues that carry one through life's fair and foul fortunes.[s40][s41] The True Meaning of Work (2009) focuses on the view of work, holding that work is no means of livelihood but a dojo for tempering the mind and elevating character, and advocating loving your work, exerting an effort second to none, treating the moment you decide something cannot be done as the start of the work, and finding the answer in the field.[s39][s42] Amoeba Management (2006) systematically lays out the management mechanism of small accounting units, unit-time accounting and shared philosophy.[s42] Heart, published in 2020 when he was eighty-eight, is regarded as his closing work, taking the heart as the thread that unifies the mental methods of a lifetime.[s43] These books speak little of strategic models and much of mind and morality, forming an operable Eastern philosophy of life and management that returns to the bestseller lists with every economic downturn.[s40]

**Q10: 稻盛和夫去世后，他留下了怎样的遗产？**

A: 2022年8月24日，稻盛和夫在京都家中因衰老辞世，享年90岁，家属遵照遗愿谢绝一切吊唁供品[s6]。他留下的遗产可分三个层面。其一是企业：京瓷自上市以来从未年度亏损，创业首年销售额2600万日元，如今集团年销售额逾2万亿日元、全球员工约7.3万人；KDDI稳居日本第二大电信运营商；日航在他重建后长期保持健康运营[s9][s37][s7]。其二是制度与奖项：阿米巴经营、单位时间核算、会计七原则成为全球企业学习的管理工具；1984年他捐出约200亿日元设立稻盛财团与京都奖，该奖被誉为“日本的诺贝尔奖”，至今每年颁奖[s25][s26]。其三是思想：“敬天爱人”“作为人，何谓正确”“六项精进”“经营十二条”等经由盛和塾约1.5万名塾生和畅销数百万册的著作传播到中日及全球，中国外交部在他去世后公开肯定他为中日友好交流所作的贡献[s10][s14][s3]。当然，学界与企业界对阿米巴模式的文化适用性、“哲学共有”的边界也有讨论，张瑞敏等即强调不能脱离本土制度土壤照搬[s29][s15]。但无论如何，他用一生证明了“把作为人应该做的正确之事以正确方式贯彻到底”的力量，这是其遗产中最持久的部分[s14][s40]。

**Q10 (EN): What legacy did Kazuo Inamori leave behind after his death?**

A: On August 24, 2022, Kazuo Inamori died of old age at his home in Kyoto at ninety, and in accordance with his wishes his family declined all offerings of condolence and flowers.[s6] The legacy he left can be divided into three layers. The first is enterprise: Kyocera has never posted an annual loss since its listing, from sales of 26 million yen in its first year to group annual sales of more than 2 trillion yen today with roughly 73,000 employees worldwide; KDDI holds firm as Japan's second-largest telecom carrier; and Japan Airlines long maintained healthy operations after his reconstruction.[s9][s37][s7] The second is institutions and awards: amoeba management, unit-time accounting and the Seven Principles of Accounting have become management tools studied by companies around the world, and in 1984 he donated some 20 billion yen to establish the Inamori Foundation and the Kyoto Prize, praised as Japan's Nobel Prize, which is awarded every year to this day.[s25][s26] The third is thought: the maxims "revere the divine and love people," "what is right as a human being," the Six Disciplines and the Twelve Management Principles spread, through the roughly 15,000 Seiwajuku members and books selling in the millions, to China, Japan and the wider world, and after his death China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs publicly affirmed his contributions to China-Japan friendship and exchange.[s10][s14][s3] Of course, academic and business circles also debate the cultural applicability of the amoeba model and the boundaries of shared philosophy, and Zhang Ruimin among others has stressed that it cannot be copied in detachment from the local institutional soil.[s29][s15] But in any case, he proved with a lifetime the power of carrying through, in the right way, the right things a human being ought to do, and that is the most enduring part of his legacy.[s14][s40]

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