Intra-office Equipment Engineer @NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation)
Though I finished a course of general studies at high school, NTT, the telecommunication monopolistic enterprise with 350 thousand employees then, put me in the engineering career as an intra-office engineer to maintain the exchanging machines. I was assigned to a telephone office in Yoichi, a town about 80km far in the west of Sapporo.
While working there, I prepared for the entrance exam of the intensive two-year training program for would-be executives, called Daigaku-bu (meaning “college division”) . Fulfilled the requirement of two year work experience, I took the exam and passed it, recording the top grade among all of the new high school grad trainees.
I very much preferred the art courses such as economics, business management, psychology, philosophy (particularly existentialism) in the freshman year to the engineering courses in the sophomore year. Outside of the institute, being in the biggest capital city surely gave various inputs that I had never had before. I decided to definitely pursue the career of business management in the ever-changing city that never sleeps.
The six year experience at NTT has enabled me to depict a clear contrast of organizational behaviors between large organizations and small ones. The knowledge about slow and vague decision-making in the huge organizations was certainly a great foundation of tactics scheming for the small business enterprises competing with the large.
Basic knowledge of risk management learned at the institute was soon demonstrated in the disastrous fire in the nucleus telephone cable tunnel in the Tokyo suburban area in1984. Practical method of the safety control instructed at the machine rooms later made the clients of MSI-Group delighted when I gave an instant brief lecture about it. Even the basic numerical optimization process of traffic planning back then has definitely given me a good start in exploring a proper inventory control procedure. I learned numerous things back then.