Collegial management as a “great synthesis,” and the move to divisional headquarters (1965)

Choosing to have no one-man ruler

The core of this decision was to replace, with committees and delegation, the founding family’s gravity that the dissolution of the zaibatsu had taken away whether Taisei liked it or not. Rather than entrust an ownerless company once more to a single powerful chief, president Homma Kahei referred management policy to the board of managing directors and confined himself to the chair — a check system, as he called it. His reading of the name “Taisei” as Mencius’ synthesis, a chorus, presented that collective leadership not as an arrangement borrowed from outside but as an idea rooted in where the company came from.

Collegial management is, of course, slower than the flash of a gifted individual, and Homma himself conceded the weakness: “we cannot do anything extraordinary.” Even so, the pattern of dividing authority among headquarters — the great synthesis of organisation — survived as the result of choosing, unusually early in the postwar period, to run on something other than one person, and it shaped the organisational character of the company that later grew into a super general contractor. Not who leads, but by what mechanism decisions are made: this decision is instructive for having put that question into the design of the organisation itself.