AMITA designs the future

The AMITA Group in 2021 consolidated its B2B and B2C (community) businesses into the Social Systems Design Business, which serves society at large. And the year 2022 marked the beginning of our ecosystem-driven business management, when we unveiled the AMITA Group Vision 2030, which represents our initiative and commitment to creating an ecosystem society by 2030.

An ecosystem society draws inspiration from the natural ecosystem around us. Today's society is facing the increasingly serious environmental challenges of climate change and depleting natural resources. A growing number of people are suffering emotional hunger from loneliness and isolation. To overcome and survive these mounting challenges, we must go beyond fulfilling SDGs and shift gears toward achieving an ecosystem society and ecosystem-driven business management. We at the AMITA Group intend to work with all our stakeholders to design and build a sustainable ecosystem society in which natural and social-engagement capital will be enhanced in a virtuous circle as society grows.

The world is at a critical crossroads today. Many businesses have learned the hard way that the taste of success or the norm of the past no longer provides viable solutions to succeeding in a playing field in which the rules of games are changing fundamentally and constantly. It is like a crustal movement on earth caused by the enormous energy of underground magma.
The only way for a business to continue creating value in this fundamentally changing business environment is to break from the past and transform the way it operates.

The earth has gone through a series of extinction-level events which have triggered surviving life forms to evolve and adapt to new environments. In the aftermath of the Cambrian Explosion half a billion years ago, diverse multicellular life forms, from which human ancestors with an endoskeletal structure were descended, suddenly came into being.
A business will have a better chance of success in a fast-changing environment if its organization has an endoskeletal structure that protects its core competences inside and is separated from its external environment with a thin, flexible layer, rather than an exoskeletal structure protected by a hard, inflexible outer shell and closed to its external environment. The AMITA Group has thus chosen to establish an endoskeletal corporate structure that enables us to engage and work closely with external stakeholders in order to adapt to changing business environments more effectively.

This is a rhizomatous corporate structure built on self-organizing dynamics. Self-organizing dynamics is a phenomenon in which individual organisms behave independently of each other without a big-picture perspective but unconsciously form an orderly system as a result. Such phenomena are commonly observed in natural settings and are an integral part of natural ecosystems. "Rhizome" is a French word for "rootstock." In a rhizomatous organization, stakeholders are interconnected with each other, as in a rootstock, to exchange visions and ideas to create greater value together.

The AMITA Group's mission is to achieve a sustainable society that values cyclical relationships. To fulfill this mission, we encourage every employee to take the initiative and ownership in everything they do at work. To put this policy into practice, we have implemented a series of major company-wide change initiatives over the past several years. They include discontinuing individual performance appraisals of employees, spinning off core businesses into separate entities to make them more agile, offering a 32-hour workweek, to employees, and providing incentives for employee volunteers. It is a human nature to seek stability and resist change. When the company started to implement these changes, some expressed reservations. Today, I am pleased to tell you that every employee has embraced these change initiatives and is acting on them.

Our joint projects to create value with our stakeholders on a rhizomatous network have been proceeding at an accelerated pace. We have established joint venture companies and new subsidiaries, and initiated a series of cross-industry collaborations with partners in the manufacturing, financial services, and ICT sectors. In 2023, we plan to team up with several universities on major projects. In this way, like-minded entities have brought their human, physical, financial, and information resources to partnerships to add greater value to them.

In pursuit of a common mission, we will continue to join forces with like-minded partners that are constantly updating the way they operate, so that we can together make the twenty-first century a visionary one for the current and future generations.
The AMITA Group is committed to achieving an ideal society that cherishes a bountiful nature and lasting people-to-people relationships and upholds the dignity of human lives. I urge you to join us in this challenging but inspiring endeavor.