What is Amoeba Management?

"Amoeba Management," a concept Inamori created through his own real-world leadership experiences, involves dividing a large organization into small, autonomous groups. These smaller units, and their individual leaders, facilitate a collaborative management style throughout the company.


The Amoeba approach ensures detailed oversight and meticulous operational execution down to the very edges of the organization.


Under the Amoeba System, a company's management philosophy is entrusted to each amoeba leader. Even if these individuals have limited experience, they serve as the true managers of their small units, formulating and executing their business plans under the approval of upper management. This framework fosters new generations of leaders brimming with managerial awareness at early phases of their careers.


With these leaders at the helm, members of each amoeba set their own goals and work fervently to achieve them. The result is "Management by All," where everyone is united in pursuing goals that align with company-wide objectives.


In essence, Amoeba Management is a management system that begins with dividing an organization into small units called "amoebas." It nurtures leaders with managerial awareness while achieving what is known as "Management by All," where every employee plays a major role and voluntarily participates in managing the unit.


The implementation steps of The Amoeba model:


Division of Amoeba units: To divided into a number of small independent accounting units according to the business characteristics and organizational structure.
Develop an independent accounting system: Each Amoeba unit needs to develop its own plan and conduct independent accounting to ensure that it breaks even.
Training Amoeba leadership: by training and empowerment to developing each Amoeba’s leadership and inspire their-selves enterprising sprite.
Building trust and transparency: in the Amoeba model, trust and transparency are essential among the enterprise members, a fair internal pricing and transparent information sharing mechanism need to be established.

Advantages

1.The number of members of an Amoeba is small, so the results appear immediately, thus it is easy to give personnel a sense of ownership.
2.It is easy to develop and identify leaders with management skills using the amoebas.
3.Since the profitability metrics of an amoeba are unified, it is easy to weed out the competition between amoebas.

Drawbacks

1. Amoeba is too focused on its own profitability, thus making it easy to pursue the interests of the amoeba over those of the company as a whole.
2. It takes time to calculate the "profit per hour." If not calculated fairly, this method can not be used as an adequate evaluation of profitability, or as a comparison against other amoebas.