Sunmark Publishing Rights Highlights
and NEWS Mail--May 2015 Issue
Hello! My name is Shino Kobayashi and I’ve just joined the company starting this April as a rights manager. I’m very excited and thrilled to be a member of Sunmark Publishing.
In fact, I’ve known Sunmark for quite a long time, first as a reader, then as a co-agent handling their rights. From the outside, I’ve always kept my eye on what they have been doing.
Now I have this great opportunity to be a part of their organization. Life is strange! This is a real “Law of Attraction”, I must say.
To quickly introduce myself: I was born in Shizuoka, where the famous Mt. Fuji is located. I moved to the United States at the age of 16, stayed there for 8 years, and then came back to Tokyo after graduating from an art school in California. Besides reading, I love music and football. As for music, Kraftwerk is my all-time favorite and Richie Hawtin is my hero. Recently I’ve devoted a lot of my time to watching football games. I’m a big fan of Shimuzu S-Pulse, a football team from my hometown. But I could spend a lot of time talking about music and football, so I shouldn’t start.
Anyway, I’m pleased to introduce myself to all of you, and I’m looking forward to working together with you in the near future!
If you have any questions or inquiries about this NEWS Mail, please contact Mr. Ichiro Takeda, Rights Department (rights@sunmark.co.jp).
We’re attending BEA this year!
It’s been a while since we attended BEA. Although we go to the Frankfurt Book Fair every year and have a stand there, we’ve been skipping London and BEA recently. So attending BEA is going to be a fresh opportunity for us to catch up with the U.S. market. Both Ichiro Takeda and Shino Kobayashi will attend the fair, and we’ll eagerly welcome the opportunity if you’d like to meet with us. Please do contact us!
ISBN978-4-7631-3411-0
210 pages / February 2015 / 1,400 yen (w/o tax)
Superior thinking and organizational skills made simple, based on the work ethic of Toyota, one of the world's top companies.
At Toyota, the world’s largest automobile corporation, there is one basic thing that all employees take for granted. It is the practice of consolidating all necessary information into a single piece of paper. It is the approach to preparing everything from meeting minutes and business trip reports to business proposals and meeting materials on a single piece of A3 or A4 size paper. Within the company, this practice contributed to the betterment of information distribution, smoother communication, and more efficient problem solving which, according to the author, helped build Toyota — with its workforce of some 70,000 people — into the leading enterprise that it is. The author himself worked for Toyota, a company that is recognized as the nation’s best. He accumulated an abundance of experience from working for the company, where he learned that your strengths and capabilities at work can be enhanced through continuous trial and error. Drawing from the essence of the “1 page” approach that he learned there, he has developed an organizational system that can be applied to various work-related settings.
“Work is a continuous process…”
“The proposal was rejected…”
“I’m having trouble explaining this…”
This book provides an extremely effective method for getting rid of such stresses in one fell swoop. Try it out for yourself.
– What Toyota employees do without fail at every meeting
– Get your thoughts organized with the “1 page” approach
– How to bring your yearly overtime hours down from 400 to 0
– Transform “ask” into “action”
– Which is more efficient, typing or writing by hand?
– What is the key to being organized?
– Anybody can communicate logically using the “three questions”
– The essence of the “1 page” approach is to maintain forward motion at work
– Ask “How?” five times rather than asking “Why?” five times
– The goal is to be able to work without the use of paper
My favorite key term introduced in this book is “transparency.” Consolidate everything down to one page. If you do this, you can clearly see the whole picture at a glance. It’s a simple concept, but once I tried putting the author’s methods into practice, even the briefest of meeting notes were significantly easier to follow when looking back at them afterwards. Without changing the essence of my message, I greatly improved my organizational skills by following the methods introduced in this book. I want readers to experience that same sense of satisfaction and achievement.