My happiness formula in business

＊This article was originally written in Japanese by our CEO, Yoshihide Arai on his blog.

What I believe is the most important when thinking about how to build a great company is that all the people who get involved with us become happy and have a good life through business with us. It includes the employees, their families, our clients, individual users and stock holders. All of them.

Almost all the judgements I made in the past were based on this idea.

You might think I am a neighborly-loving person, but I’m not. Rather, I am the opposite by nature.

Until I started to work, I had an exclusive style of human relationship and my friendship was tightly closed, so for some people I guess I seemed like a very unfriendly person.

However, on the other side, I got lonely easily. Every time I got to know a friend who became popular among everyone, I always got jealous of him. But I hated to imitate him at the same time. Complicated.

I was such a person.

I’ve been a corporate manager since I was 26 years old and experienced a lot of adversity and made many tough decisions. Through the process, I’ve had countless opportunities to ask myself about this simple question: “What is a happy life for a business person?”. And I’d been struggling to figure out the answer.

As a result of the questioning, at some point I’ve got a conclusion.

I believe we can have a truly happy business life when there is a great match between what we crave to do and what we feel obsessed to do as a life mission.

In my case, the former is to get trust, gratitude and respect from all the people who get involved with me in life, and the latter is to create a company that can give a huge positive impact on society.

After getting to this conclusion, I kept thinking about Atrae with heart and soul.

What kinds of companies can give happiness to the employees and their families?

If I were one of the employees, would I really want to work here? If not so, then what is missing?

How can I harmonize growth of the company and employees’ happiness both in the short term and the long term?

I wanted to define an ideal business organization, from scratch.

I’ve been still in the middle of the process, but I’m 100% sure that we can realize a match between the two factors when we have a deep consideration on it.

I guess it is a both-way interaction. On one side, company leaders should create an environment where each employee can achieve personal growth and fulfillment. On the other side, each employee should seek out the best way to realize both contribution to the organization and his/her personal growth.

When we can harmonize the two, I believe we can grow exponentially as a company and as individuals.

I think we human beings feel happiness from the bottom of our hearts when we can feel we are making contribution to something important in our lives. And I believe it is the same even in business.

Right now, I’ve been in a challenge to create the next standard of business organizations, and I’ve been taking huge pride in it because I believe it will be the place where the nature of people truly flourishes and people can output the highest performances. All the great inventions and innovations come from people. So I swear we continue to focus on it.

I’m not a charismatic CEO. However, I believe I can create a charismatic company that attracts people in the world. I’m so excited about it.