Dear someone interested in hiring me,
Do you need to solve problems? I can help you. But before you read how and why I do that, please be patient about reading my philosophy about making money. Then I’ll tell you how and why people like me can do that.
Money is interchangeable with time. If you do something wrong, either pay a penalty or go to jail. Conversely, compensation takes the form of money or time. Companies give up cash and equity in exchange for hiring. How do you save money? I’m not mistaking saving and making. Saving money impacts more than consumers think. When businesses purchase goods or services, you pay from your profit, not from sales. To profit 100 dollars, the sales must be 500 dollars if the cost rate is 80 percent. Saving 100 dollars equals selling goods or services priced at 500 dollars.
Two ways to make more profits are to sell more or increase margin. The option of selling more has two ways to accomplish: selling more units and raising the price. I’m sensitive about the user’s frequency of transactions with businesses because I used to run a business, and it was only once for the nature of the business. I tried to increase the lifetime value of the customers who already used my services. Upsell, cross-sell, affiliate, subscription model, you name it.
As to the ways of increasing profit margins, for large companies, saving money, namely cost cuts, is one way. But, it has a side effect in the long run: a decrease in market share typically caused by lowered motivation in research and development. A McKinsey’s 2018 report introduces managers at a consumer goods company who had to admit they shouldn’t have reduced the budget for value-creating departments of the company, “Performance slumped so badly that managers were compelled to acknowledge, in the annual report, that they had underinvested in product development and marketing…”(Koller and McGinn 1).
Another way to increase margins is to raise prices. But can you do that? The reality was the opposite. The prices of services were highest when I started my business. Then, other parties mimicked them, and the competition arose. Once the competition begins, you cannot raise prices but on the contrary, you have to lower them.
One of the lessons from my experience is the process of educating clients or customers should not be penetrated by competitors. Using the Web is a double-edged sword because you can reach broader potential customers while, at the same time, you might be educating potential competitors unwillingly.
The only way to keep companies profitable is by improving existing services and developing new ones. Services and products are made by collective efforts. This is when teamwork comes in. But, before approaching that, I want to write about shipping containers because that is what I’m familiar with from one of my careers and bridges smoothly what happened in manufacturing and what is happening in knowledge work.
In Fall 2023, I listened to the Audible of book “The Box”. Whereas it tells “how the shipping container made the world smaller and the world economy bigger,” my focus here is that vertical integration in manufacturing dissolved into narrowly specialized production of parts. The reduced transportation cost caused by containerization of ocean cargo shipment makes distance less critical than before. As a result, makers of merchandise and retailers organized supply chains. That was a big transformation from how manufacturers did before, where they tended to own sources of raw materials and transportation means and performed as many processes as possible to reduce transportation costs (Levinson 355).
Internal transaction costs to hands and mouths of labor are similar to transportation costs to physical material. Companies store them as employees so they can access those resources internally. But as global supply chains become ubiquitous, processes performed as integral portions were replaced by parts procured from specialized manufacturers. An example of the ramifications of such change is the closure of the General Motors plant in Dayton, Ohio. One employee recalls, “GM afforded me a great life. That was cut off when they closed the doors. We will never ever make that type of money again. Those days are over” (Bognar and Reichert). What he describes is a “good job” that was paid more than the value an employee created. When an organization holds many “good jobs,” it needs to balance the budget for salaries by paying proportionately less than the value of the contributions to people who produced the value-added with a disproportionate share in an organization (Davidson and Rees-Mogg 253). The loss of “good jobs” results from the Business Process Re-engineering conducted by organizations.
In 2016, I invented a way of finishing a task as a part of my job in business process engineering. With that invention, Vietnamese operators who don’t understand Japanese can translate specific types of Vietnamese legal documents into Japanese. What I did was list up all the items that could appear in the forms, store the pairs of their Japanese equivalents and them in databases, and develop a web system allowing operators to choose items from the lists and output a translated version of the documents with format. The beauty of the system was not only that the operators only needed to see Vietnamese, but one of their indigenous capabilities was fully utilized. The documents were hand-written. Even well-trained translators can’t easily read the hand-script of a target language. Moreover, this system is free from errors.
I came up with this idea when I learned about Amazon Mechanical Turk. It is a marketplace for human labor and simple cognitive tasks such as identifying specific figures in an image. There would’ve been some potential issues if I had used it, so I only borrowed the idea of its error prevention strategy, where a final output was only produced when the outcomes of the multiple workers were identical. Then, I designed a web system dedicated to the tasks in my business. It would’ve been costly if I had contracted Vietnamese-Japanese translators because their compensation was higher than those who don’t know the two languages. Also, if I had done it because I use both languages, I would’ve been busy and couldn’t have done other work. Thanks to my invention, I saved money and time from my business. I materialized this prediction, “The economic value of memorization as a skill will fall, while the importance of synthesis and creative application of information will rise” (Davidson and Rees-Mogg 255).
To sum up what I’ve written so far, the efficacy of the shipping container brought the concept of the supply chain, which freed businesses from keeping resources handy and made them rethink their business model. That involved cutting costs bloated by “good jobs” created from the necessity of reducing external transaction costs. The Internet has changed knowledge work the same way. It accelerates the outsourcing business process and decreases the value of memorizing facts and knowledge. As a result, how to combine existing knowledge and apply it to problems has become more valuable, typically realized by risk-taking entrepreneurs. The United States is the nation that many of the frontrunners in this arena reside in because of the ideas encircling the teamwork backed by its diversity.
A corporate strategies consultant, economist, and author, Yumi Kobayashi, who lived in the country for 26 years, writes, “There are know-hows in a society where people with different backgrounds gather and dissipate. That differs from the knowledge gained in cultures where similar people have resided since long ago. The source of power to concentrate human capital is management savvy enforced by achieving the goal for which they gather (Kobayashi 242). According to Gary Althen, advising international students for thirty years at the University of Iowa, Americans prefer knowing a meeting’s goal. They may ask questions like “What’s the agenda?” and “Why are we here?” (Althen and Bennett 225)
By asking these questions, people with various backgrounds center around a goal and exert their capabilities to be effective. Although distributing information, garnering feedback, or even brainstorming can be done online, in-person communication is still an invaluable means to mix, merge, and synthesize knowledge and experience. American society has historically and inherently designed and implemented it. This value-create orientation brought me to the U.S. I wanted people working with me to neglect differences and focus on value creation because I was different. I have an autism spectrum disorder and traits of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Before detailing the disorders, it’s meaningful to present this aspect of human nature. Preferring the similar creates biases. Yale psychologists Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom experimented with babies exposed to animal puppet shows. They concluded that people’s nature of treating in favor of someone exhibiting resembling characteristics is the origin of biasing (Wynn and Bloom). Babies liked to penalize the puppets that preferred different cereals from the kinds they liked. In the business world, companies overcoming this intrinsic tendency of liking the similar are rewarded. There is a universal correlation between the diversified leadership of corporations and financial performance. Research on the dataset of over 1000 companies and 12 countries concludes such (Hunt et al. 1). Indeed, the two psychologists' more in-depth research on older children indicates that education intervenes with innate immorality and changes habits.
If you think your company is not such a large corporation, nor can it embrace superior diversity, please wait. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder can provide your organization with direct competitiveness. Knowing two ideas is critical to understand why and how it’s possible. First, they are member spectrums of broader nerve system natures, and second, their conditions are invisible. I’ll explain the first concept later.
The qualities of diversity such as gender, race, physical disorders, and the animal puppets' cereal preferences are visible. In contrast, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are invisible. Why is the invisibility of ASD and ADHD critical? Knowing whether someone has a disability affects how you facilitate their work. How do you know those disabilities? It's vision that you know they are there. It’s not limited to determining physical disabilities like immobility with wheelchairs but includes the perception of mental disorders like Down Syndrome. If I hadn’t written about it, you wouldn’t have known that I had autistic and ADHD traits. The prevailing and predominant way for a person to recognize that another individual has a disability is vision.
My disclosure is similar to that those with wheelchairs let companies know their visits in advance. They want to know if the buildings are accessible, and I want you to know what happens in my brain. It might damage the possibility of my obtaining a salaried position. Not only because there exists some prejudice about autistic people but also because people with ASD and ADHD are used to masking their disabilities so well that getting hired is not as difficult as doing so by those with visible disorders (Teindl et al.).
You might have thought what my challenges are, then. It’s something after being hired. I lack these abilities: reading social cues, being aware of unwritten rules, and the capability to amuse others. Many living with autism stand on the verge of conformity or violation of the unwritten social rules at offices, factories, stores, and schools. They often break the rules unknowingly (Hensel 78). Being bullied is normal. All these lead to retreating from social engagement, and we just leave. Thinking about how the connection to others is critically important to a person’s happiness, I am wired like this is a sad experience. If I could ask you for only one thing, Ellie Middleton speaks for me. “This one might sound simple, but it's a just-as-important-as-ever reminder to everybody, whether neurodivergent or neurotypical, to please, please be kind. We never, ever know what is going on in somebody else's world, never, ever know the reasons why they act the way they do, behave differently from us or struggle with certain things (Middleton 125).”
Before continuing, I must explain the concepts of neurodiversity and neurodivergent people. This is a building block of understanding why and how people with autistic traits and ADHD can deliver direct competitiveness to your business. A couple of weeks ago, I realized that a new concept had emerged in the people with a keen awareness of this arena. It’s the term ‘neurodiversity,’ the concept in which various developmental, psychological, and neurological conditions are encompassed. Those conditions are once considered discrete and studied separately. However, they are now conceptually distilled into the more abstract idea called neurodiversity. Disorders such as autism, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), dysgraphia, dyspraxia, Tourette syndrome, and Down syndrome are now seen as members of it. And, in autism itself, different traits exist to different extents, hence the name of the autism spectrum (Mahto et al. 5).
I’ll introduce this against the bad odds laid by the stigma. It’s unemployability of us. One of the reasons employers think those with invisible disorders are unemployable is their cognitive inflexibility. As the workplace environment changes, different responsibilities arise. To employers’ eyes in retail industries, people with autism spectrum disorder and ADHD look rigid in such environments (Albright et al.). Although some truth lies in it, isn’t that because the operations are not well standardized? In my opinion, a business relying on how well employees react at the customer front doesn’t fit well with folks with neurodiversity. It doesn’t scale either.
Nonetheless, a business with overly well-defined operations does not utilize neurodivergent people’s abilities either, especially autistic people like me. That’s because, in my case, I tend to adhere to challenging problems whose causes and symptoms are widespread. The reversed version of that mental posture is this. In the industrial age, jobs were stereotypically categorized, and a slogan emphasized organizational laziness: “That’s not my job” (Davidson and Rees-Mogg 251). But, in many situations, “that is part of my job” is my posture. It is attributed to Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt, the pioneer of the Theory of Constraints and the author of the book “The Goal.” I read all the available documents on the theory at that time. I was working as an assistant factory manager of a cable harness manufacturer. This is the part I highlighted in the sequel, “It's Not Luck,” “Precisely. Only one or two core problems that are the cause for all the others. That’s why I don’t call the symptoms problems, I call them undesirable effects. They are unavoidable derivatives of the core problem.” (Goldratt 94)
I have internalized this theory since then because it goes well with my trait: streamlining structures. Streamlining things is “something specific to autistic people” (Harris). The founder of a community of neurodivergent people, Ellie Middleton, talked to LinkedIn. A neurodivergent leader of Delloite, one of the big four accounting firms, also confirms that he can see a point, reorganize it, and express it in simpler terms when discussing something (Mahto et al.). From the opposite direction, this idea can be understood like this. “The person with a strong working memory can find this kind of elegant, creative simplification harder to do. Their strong working memory means they don’t need to find ways to simplify” (Oakley and Sejnowski 180). It’s seeing and understanding broader facts, finding only one or two core drivers, expressing them in a simplified way, and designing streamlined solutions. That’s what many autistic people and I do.
However, my attempts to think seriously about issues that way were frequently hampered by the widespread inclination to pursue partial optimizations. They often get tractions by political incentives and logical fallacies. When those are identified and cleared under leadership motivated by a single core goal, I could’ve performed best. However, I wasn’t given many opportunities to think streamliningly and act accordingly before starting my own business. That might be because I was born and worked in Japan—a country with a long history in the Far East. One confession by the chief executive of a UK-based data services company resonates with me. In an interview, he admits the difficulty of office politicking prodded him to start his own business. He says, "I struggle to do things that I don't find logical, which makes working in an environment difficult when you're working for other people." (Jacobs).
Other than the opportunities to perform full-swing streamlining and creation, ownership or the orientation of thinking that anything I’m working on matters is another present my business experience left for me. When there is an issue, and I am there, the issue matters. Conversely, I’m not there if it doesn’t deserve it. And, since I’ve always wanted advice from others, I also offer advice to others, thinking others also need advice. If that attitude seems to lack the understanding of the need to motivate others, that’s also true. I’ve deemed others are as serious about facing issues as I do. I might be an introverted leader who only works well with motivated members because, as author Eric Barker describes, I “know how to listen, help, and get out of the way” but am not good at motivating others (Barker 133).
More and more people are getting open to disclosing their neurodivergent qualities. In the U.K., the book by Scottish comedian Fern Brady, “Strong Female Character,” was published in June 2023. It has already gotten over two thousand reviews on Amazon.com when writing this letter (November 2023), and the average score is 4.7. The book by the personality I cited more than once in this letter, Ellie Middleton, touts that the publication of her text is just the beginning (Middleton 198). People might have been encouraged to unmask their neurodivergent traits. But please wait. If one episode of an entrepreneur who was initially based in London and then moved to Silicon Valley is correct, something must have happened in the U.S. before. This is the portrait after returning from his visit to Silicon Valley, “the conversations he had had with those people were incomparably more useful than those with people in London.” (Stross)
Truly, in the U.S., entities who know what they are doing, or a group of people setting their goals explicitly and focusing on their core competencies, had started seeing the world differently together with neurodivergent people. Positive aspects that neurodivergent people can bring to workplaces are trustworthiness, strong memories, reliability, adherence to rules, and attention to detail (Harris). One of those who find those characteristics valuable is Wells Fargo. A woman who once worked for herself is featured in an article by USA Today in August 2023. Her employment by the company is an outcome of their broader attempt to fill positions requiring sought-after skills (Jones).
But, back in 2017, some companies already remodeled their hiring processes. Those were SAP, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Microsoft, Willis Towers Watson, Ford, and EY. Companies being underway were Caterpillars, Dell, Deloitte, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and UBS. The managing director of Hewlett Packard was surprised at the multi-level benefits delivered by the program of aligning the hiring process to neurodivergent talents in the company. The metrics enhanced from hiring neurodivergent talents were productivity gains, quality improvement, augmented innovation abilities, and more engaged employees. (Austin and Pisano).
Although the Covid-19 pandemic made us rethink how we work, Middleton still sees many workplaces making their workforce work conventionally in terms of time and places. She suggests businesses benefit from accommodating the different needs of both neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals in her 2023 book (Middleton 133). Still, the U.S. advances earlier in this area again. The previously touched Harvard Business Review article in 2017 reads, “Perhaps the most surprising benefit is that managers have begun thinking more deeply about leveraging the talents of all employees through greater sensitivity to individual needs.” (Austin and Pisano)
By the way, I noticed that an Amazon review of the book by Fern Brady double-quoted the word “normal" followed by the word “society” and preceded by "the sickness of”. It gained the highest number of people who found it helpful in the thirteen reviews on the first page. Ellie Middleton says it’s the system that is failing, not the people with neurodiversity. She continues. Everyone, including neurotypical people, fails because of the current homogeneous system. It’s not going to distinguish our unique profiles, allow us to come up with uncommon ideas, or perform to our full potential (Middleton 131).
But, to my eyes, no, to my brain, those only seem to be the result of human adaptation to the economy. The rejection of unique profiles and the unacceptance of uncommon ideas are still or once deemed necessary qualities to work effectively, especially in the agricultural and industrial ages. But as I mentioned earlier in this letter, manufacturing has changed, and knowledge work is also changing. As our lens’ resolution to watch and understand every phenomenon rises, how we create values and receive costs also changes. We’re becoming to understand everything more finely. Those include the spectrum of our brain characteristics.
The only element that needs more explanation would be the portion where the system does not allow us to perform to our full potential. In the earlier part of this letter, I rejected the idea of partial optimization. I still think it should be avoided. But there’s a condition. If you need to speed up the pace of change, partial optimization is the way to go. A monolithic system is hard to work with because multiple parts are coupled. The application my business used for our internal operations was monolithic. At the time close to its end of life, It could hardly accept any efforts to add a new feature to it. After some struggle, I came to know what the Microservices was.
However, at the same time, I was also making a decision to change my direction. I would be coming to the U.S. and taking college courses to learn programming.
I’m a Japanese. I’m a mostly self-taught programmer. I am an entrepreneur. And I have autistic and ADHD traits. I can help you. So, please tell me about your problems. Ask me questions. We can work together. Oh, I almost forgot to say it to you. I’ll be happy if you pay me generously. Thank you so much for reading this long letter. See you later.
Sincerely,
Takeo Shimazu
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