Pro Commerce

Interesting Innovation Story

I have a rice cooker in my kitchen. I've had one for a long time.

Rice cookers were invented in Japan in 1955 by members of the Minami family in Tokyo. Later marketed by Toshiba. The members of the family made many traditional iron pots of rice every day over a charcoal flame and measured the temperature of the water and the length of time to cook to taste. The temperature is boiling. The time is 20 minutes. Yoshitada Minami was issued global patents on the invention. The marketed product had to have a sleeve of warm air to make it usable in many climates.

From the point of innovation, the rice cooker ranks as one of the most successful inventions of all time. It is novel, invented and ubiquitous.

Why was it invented in 1955 in Japan? I see lessons for the issue of what makes innovation and successful marketing possible.

Rice eating people numbered approximately half the world population in 1955, 1.5 billion people. Japan was unique in this population in several ways.

• Japan was a thriving market economy unlike all the other rice countries run by dictators, emperors or kings.

• Japan had a booming, expansive economy where much of the old infrastructure had been destroyed by the War.

• Japan had a long history of independent technological innovation.

• Women were entering the workforce and the workforce was short of skilled workers. Men and women leaving the home to work, created a driving pressure for home improvement technologies.

• The inventor and his family were part of the new emerging middle class, not the old elite.

• There was a great sense of optimism and an expansive commercial future in Japan.

• Lastly, Minami had a relationship with Toshiba Corporation that had solid manufacturing and national distribution facilities.

I find many of these qualities are central to all innovation. A thriving market economy, great optimism, the absence of a powerful ruling class, technological competence and marketing distribution.

Ann and the postcard

Every year, I spend a few months in Japan. One year, in the mid 1970s, I was in Kyoto where one of my kids was going to an international school for an introduction to Japanese arts. I had been to the school a few years earlier and loved it.

As usual, I sent lovely Japanese postcards back to my girlfriends. There were several at the time.

I looked forward to getting back to see one of my long-term favorites, Ann. Ann and I had been seeing each other for about two years. We had traveled together and were very close. We'd had a very dramatic break-up, but after a few months we had gotten back together.

Ann was a very high-strung redhead. A brilliant woman who had been the PR director for a major New York museum, now a Zen hippie, influential in hippie journalism. We first got together in the coast-side pied-a-terre of her last boy friend, a prominent writer and scholar. She must have been angry with him because our first sex was in his bedroom.

During the break-up period I had added a new girlfriend, India. India was beautiful and interesting. I knew that Ann and India had started working together on an environmental project while I was in Kyoto.

A few days after returning and after I was over jet lag, I picked up Ann in the late afternoon for a drive in the mountains near the coast.  When I stopped the car at an overlook, Ann proceeded to punch me in the side with all her fury and power. She screamed that I had sent the same 'I miss you terribly' postcard to her and to India.

I learned that while I was out of the country she and India had been working together, some of the time at India's home in the country. Ann was in the habit of picking up India's mail at the roadside postbox to take to the house where they worked together.

Ann claimed I wrote the same postcard to both of them. I don't think I did.

Many years later, I was not invited to her funeral.

Miner's lettuce

Another anecdote. This relates to the photo on the right.

This is in my neighborhood. It is a spot where Miner's lettuce used to grow.

I know because I have a very distinct memory associated with the lettuce I picked on this spot.

The Miner's lettuce no longer seems to grow here. There is a new house here and a fence that may have changed the sunlight. Also, a giant oak that grew here was cut down. But that is another story.

In the early 1970s, I was at a reception where I was introduced to a lovely young lady. I was in my early 30s, she was in her mid 20s. As was my custom with single women, I invited her to my house for a dinner I would cook.

I soon learned she was just becoming well-known as the chef who opened Chez Panisse. As the date for dinner approached, I realized that my cooking skills would be inadequate. So I decided the only solution was to prepare only locally sourced ingredients. The salad was Miner's lettuce from the spot in the photo and I got wild onions from my yard. The vegetable was spinach I picked near near Land's End -- still a little salty after steaming.

Everything went wrong. I lit a lovely fire. The dinner was cooked perfectly for the arrival time of 7 pm. Alice called to say she would be two hours late -- she had to meet with a wine seller.

By 9 o'clock the meal was re-heated, the fire was rebuilt and I was discouraged.

When Alice arrived, I served the first course. She was horrified. She and her father had invested a quarter million dollars in a farm to grow Miner's lettuce. But it wouldn't be domesticated. Everything was downhill from there on.

The final blow was my apple and berry tart. Alice asked if I had cut the apples on the same board where I had cut the onions. I had. But my taste was not sensitive enough to notice.

We were sitting on pillows on the floor, hippie style. I fell asleep. She left quietly.

Emergency cache

I have an interesting experience with an emergency cache I set aside in the late 1970s.

I put about $10,000 in an envelope. It consisted of U.S. dollars, French francs, travelers checks from two different banks in U.S. dollars, and Japanese yen.

With the advent of this current plague, I got the money out.

Several lessons about money and time emerge. It has been roughly 40 years since I created this cache and never looked at it.

In the meantime, the European Union was created and a cross-national currency was created. The French francs were open to conversion for the first ten years of the E.U. That ten years ended in February 2012. I have $5,000 worth of worthless francs.

In the four decades I have held them, travelers checks have been replaced by credit cards as the traveler's universal currency. I use credit cards all over the world, as does everyone else. When I created MasterCard, I had that global currency function in mind. What I hadn't realized about my cache was that ordinary bank branches stopped selling travelers checks sometime in the late 1980s.

When I went to cash my Wells Fargo travelers checks at my regular branch of Wells, no one in the branch knew how to do it. Even after looking at the bank operations manual, no one could figure out how to do it. I drove downtown to the main Wells office. Same problem there.

Fortunately, half the travelers checks were issued by Citibank where I also had an account, An older operations officer at the main Citi office made an effort to figure it out. He took all my Citi and Wells checks for deposit.

The only intelligent part of the cache was the yen which had increased in value. About three times the amount I had bought them for. The dollars were worth 25 cents each based on the original purchasing power.

Draw whatever conclusions you want from my experience. My conclusion is never ignore money, of any sort, set aside for the future. Always re-examine it at regular intervals of not more than five years.