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Kazuo Inamori's Amoeba Management and philosophy

Updated 4 November 2026

Not affiliated with or endorsed by Kazuo Inamori or their companies.

Kazuo Inamori, the founder of Kyocera, described two ideas in public. Amoeba Management runs a company as small units, each with its own leader and its own profit, with everyone taking part. His philosophy rests on one judgment criterion: what is right as a human being. This page explains both from his lecture and from the Kazuo Inamori website that Kyocera runs, and shows how to apply them to your own company.

Amoeba Management: small units that each own a profit

The Kazuo Inamori website describes Amoeba Management as dividing an organisation into small, autonomous units called amoebas. Each has a leader who acts as the true manager of the unit: even with limited experience, the leader makes and carries out a business plan under upper management's approval. Members set their own goals in line with the company's, which the site calls Management by All. The Japanese page gives three aims: a profit system by department that is tied directly to the market, developing people with a manager's mindset, and management with everyone taking part.

A practical test is whether each unit can see its own revenue (including what it hands to other units) and its own expenses. In a 20-person agency where every sale is booked by the account team, the design and build teams can't see a result of their own. The usual first step is an agreed internal price for the work one unit hands to another.

Hourly efficiency: one measure for different kinds of work

Kyocera's Inamori Library says Inamori devised the Hourly Efficiency system in 1965 as a management accounting indicator. The added value created through work is divided by total working hours, giving added value per hour. Units of different sizes doing different work can then be compared on how much value they create in an hour.

Two of his Twelve Management Principles sit beside it. Article 5 says to maximise sales and minimise expenses, and article 6 says that pricing is management. Hourly efficiency can be read as the monthly check that each unit is doing both.

The philosophy: decide by what is right as a human being

In a lecture on 20 January 2010, "Why management needs a philosophy", Inamori said the root of the Kyocera Philosophy is the question of what is right as a human being, and holding to the answer. He described the content as primitive morals taught by parents and teachers, such as be honest, don't deceive people and don't lie, and said Kyocera had followed that criterion. In the same lecture he said a company aiming high needs a way of thinking that serves as everyone's standard.

His approach to accounting starts from the same place. The website's page on Inamori accounting says that when Kyocera began, he decided to base his judgments on what is right as a person, and to solve accounting problems by going back to their essence rather than to custom. The page lists seven principles, including one-to-one correspondence, double-checking and transparent ("glass-walled") management.

To apply it, restate the hard decision in one plain sentence ("optimise the refund window" becomes "make refunds slower"). Then check each option: is it honest, does it deceive anyone by silence, and would it hold up if everyone affected saw how it was made?

How to apply it to your own company

1. List your units with their leader, what each produces, and who receives it (a customer or another unit).
2. For each unit, collect revenue (or internal transfers), expenses and total hours worked.
3. Divide added value by hours for each unit, and write down which expenses you counted.
4. Check whether each leader writes the unit's plan or only receives a target.
5. Put any hard decision through the question of what is right as a human being, option by option.
6. Write the resulting standard in one sentence the team can reuse.

What the sources say, and what they don't

Everything above comes from the Kazuo Inamori website, the Inamori Library exhibition and the 2010 lecture. The sources don't give the detailed operating rules: how to draw units, how to set internal prices, or which expenses come off sales. The skills below review your current setup against the published principles; they don't reproduce Kyocera's system.