Organizational strategy first – that’s what KAYAC is all about
Not what, but who!
We strongly believe that ‘people’ are the most important asset the company has.Because it is ‘people’ who create both – the company culture as well as its business.
While considering an individual’s strength as 1, it doesn’t make sense to become an organization when 1+1 just equals 2. By assembling a team, 1+1 could become 5 or even grow into 10, that’s why we have created this ‘entity’.
Whether 1+1 becomes 5 or 10, hugely depends on the belief and drive of each person who constitute ‘the entity’. This very idea is precisely the business philosophy of the company.
Business philosophy is what unites like-minded people into a single force.It also serves as a reflection of company’s social purpose – the way company intends to contribute to the society.Business philosophy defines the ‘character’ or ‘personality’ of the company.
We see ‘people’ and ‘business philosophy’ as two fundamental pillars of our company that can’t be separated.That’s why we intensely care about them. For KAYAC, it is not about “what business we want to do”. It’s rather about “who with, under what philosophy and what company we want to build”.
Therefore, organizational strategy comes first – it’s the core of our company and business.
Recruiting strategy is the cornerstone of organizational strategy.
Web creators from all around the world gather here.
‘Creating and connecting’ is our philosophy.
‘Connecting’ hints about our ambitions to grow and expand.
To ‘create and connect’ KAYAC itself should constantly continue creating and scaling.
In other words, everyone at KAYAC has a title of ‘creator’ and it evolved into and organization where every business is built with creators initiative.
Hence our recruiting strategy is to ‘gather web creators from all around the world’.
Why now? Why web creators?
KAYAC is striving to accumulate not just creators, but web creators.
The reason behind is simple – because we see that relative value of web creators will steadily grow over the next years.
We may be engaged in various business, even outside of web world, but sure thing is that majority of businesses will derive from web creators and they will remain as the main impulse for the company.
Organization with comfort for web creators
Working system, learning, performance evaluation, organizational structure, environment – we go after all these to ensure pursuing our goals.
We settled with our headquarters in Kamakura City because of those reasons.
Swift and optimized quarterly resource allocation
We closely monitor each web-creator's involved project through the prizm of our business portfolio lifecycle, and make timely decisions to reallocate resources if necessary, based on market trends and project growth.
Having said this, KAYAC employs the scheme of project-based team structure.
We have slightly over 40 teams (as of July 2011), and every employee belongs to 2.5 projects on average. For example, one employee could have 50% dedicated to Project X, 30% to Project Y and 20% to Project Z. This metrics is also used as a baseline for setting an mid-term goals, as well as the essential point for mid-term performance evaluation.
| Social games | Koebu | Administrative | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employee A | 10 | 80 | 10 |
| Employee B | 0 | 50 | 50 |
| Employee C | 50 | 10 | 40 |
Quarterly review
| Social games | Koebu | Administrative | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employee A | 50 | 40 | 10 |
| Employee B | 30 | 50 | 10 |
| Employee C | 90 | 0 | 10 |
The only foreseen problem is
that members with 10% or less
time in a certain project might
feel less committed.
Fast-paced and flexible resource allocation
Web industry is fiercely fast. So are we. Every quarter we undergo review and reallocation of human resources.Because this readjustment happens quite often, as web-creators, our employees are always ready to hit the ground running on a new project, as well as hand over the older project to a new members with minimum or zero loss.
Multi-project participation
Majority of employees belong to more than one project. This is our strategic approach to eliminate turf-minded vertically-divided thinking, encouraging synergy-seeking work style.
Playing manager
Each team manager may also be participating in other projects as 'a player'. This help all of us keep the sense of being on field.
Involving administrative staff in projects too
Members of back office (administrative team) are also encouraged to get involved in actual projects, even with minimal time allocation (such as 5%). Thus all the employees maintain strong creative mind.
New business seeds derive from 14% rule and 3% rule.
Our business philosophy is to pursue "Creating and connecting", and as a growing and scaling company finding new business seeds always calls for urgent attention. Also, to maintain company's attractiveness for creative engineers and designers, we strive to provide an environment to constantly create new products. That's why we have 14% and 3% rules in framework of our organizational strategy.
14% of total creative resources goes to developing new businesses.
As a form of research & development, we undertake the rule of 14%, which means allocation 14% of time from total resources for developing new products, even if they are not necessarily successful as businesses. This is to give opportunity for deveopers with strong motivation to do what they are genuinely into, and it also helps in finding new horizons for KAYAC. Within the system, there could be employees who have 100% of their quarterly time allocation under 14% rule, but this doesn't mean that everyone in entire staff has individually 14%.
The system of bringing new value to society - 3% rule
To stay solid on our principle as a fun-loving company, we have a natural obligation to produce things with deep originality and useful to the society. To do this we allocate 3% of annual revenue from previous year to producing and supporting projects that bring new unique social value. It's one of ways how we express contributing by being creative.
Examples:
2010 "YUREX" for Creative Beat (in collaboration with Maywa Denki)
YUREX
2011 Supporting creators in Tohoku area through our Sendai on-the-move office.
Sendai office blog
Growth of human capital and organization is essential for business strategy.
KAYAC is a company with strong attention to organization and team-building.
Probably because of thisthe ways businesses are born in KAYAC are also different.
Our main challenge is on 2 layers - contents and social services.
The following diagram shows KAYAC's position in terms of business layers that web-related companies mosly compete on. We have 2 directions. One is creating original contents, and the other one is producing social services. Both of them have common characteristics for web developers and perfectly match our business strategy.
- Content business
- Super infra
- Network infra
- HOUSECO
- ART-Meter
- Wonderfl
jsdo.it - Koebu
- Client work
- mixi
- docomo
- au
- softbank
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg once said – Google is group of researchers, whereas Facebook is group of hackers.
Well, we think
KAYAC is a team of creators.
