Immigrant Hunger as Founding Fuel

“By his own account, Masa enjoyed his early childhood, playing hide-and-seek in the haystacks and fishing in the local Daigi river. His first encounter with overt discrimination left a scar, both mental and physical. One afternoon, on his way home from kindergarten, Masa was attacked by Japanese kids taunting him for living in the Korean ghetto. One threw a stone which struck his forehead and drew blood. It was a moment of humiliation but also self-realization: Masa spoke Japanese and he had inherited a Japanese name (‘Yasumoto’), but he was still a pariah.”

“Masa suffered hardship in those first five years, but it was nothing compared to the suffering of his parents’ generation. Their sacrifice was a powerful motivating force for the young boy, leaving him with a profound sense of obligation. Whatever he accomplished in life, however much money he made, he felt he could never erase the debt he owed his parents and grandparents.[14](private://read/01jg9b8njt7zc5haz30afb9n29/#ch02_14)”

“It’s the tale of an immigrant pip-squeak, a scrappy city kid who reaches the highest heights of the American Dream and still keeps reaching for more.”

“My parents never considered themselves poor or oppressed or downtrodden. Why should they have? They had ambition. They had hard work. They had each other. And they also had me, their first and only child, a brand-new generation to carry their dreams forward. America was the land of opportunity. Lucky for us, we were here.”

“this became the company’s number one priority. Charles: “The important thing is this can-do attitude. It’s a damn-the- torpedoes, full-speed-ahead, ready-aim-fire approach that says the hell with anything else, and it’s that kind of take- charge, we-can-do-it, nothing-can-defeat-us people who move ahead and it doesn’t matter where. In other companies, people with that kind of attitude don’t move ahead, they keep hitting this wall, and they pile up or leave. They leave—or get acquired, the whole company. Here that’s what gets people ahead. What kind of person succeeds at CA? I say self-moti- vated people. Hungry people, people who have been through a little pain in life. First-generation immigrants—they know, they've seen their parents struggle, people who arrived in this country with three suitcases, two suitcases. They’ve seen struggle, they've seen people go to school at night. They know. Something about Queens, Brooklyn people—they are so down-to-earth. You know the people. They come out of city schools, and there is something about them, there is a hustle in them, a thing that says, ‘I can do it, and if I can’t, Ill find a way—it’s not a big deal.’ That’s the kind of people who succeed. The ones who don’t succeed are the ones that come”

“Charles: “Tt all comes down to a couple of very simple things, which are: One, we ve got to get people. People who work for you. Work for you. But they’ve got to have reasons. They want to have a sense of career and that what they say has some impact. They’ve got to know their contribution has some meaning. You don’t want to work for something where you just punch in, be there for so many hours. That’s mind- less, and people will resent that, and that’s when you polarize groups. So you get them involved in decisions. Ask them. Make mistakes, but correct them, and make sure the people are always heard. The second piece of it is they want to have fun doing it. You’ve got to have a relaxed kind of driven. Driven but relaxed.””