One of the first things he did as president was to meet directly with the company's 40 department heads and 150 other employees. This was very different from Yamauchi; Yamauchi did not meet with employees often, and he usually had only one speech every year. Iwata was knew that just because he is president, that would not mean everyone would agree with him. He decided to talk to them on a personal level. If employees disagreed with his view, Iwata would suggest they follow their idea instead of his own. He said "creators only improve themselves if they take risks". Iwata also brought more data and science into the business part of the company. Yamauchi made decisions using intuition and experience, Iwata had ideas with a lot of data to convince people. Iwata also promoted Miyamoto, Genyo Takeda, Yoshihiro Mori, and Shinji Hatano to representative directors on the company's board of directors. Their positions had the same power as his own.