The resignation of president Ishibashi Nobuyasu and the founding family's course correction (1999)

The centripetal force of the founding family in an owner-managed company

The core of this removal can be seen not in the title of president but in the substantive power of decision that the founder himself continued to hold. Nobuyasu had climbed the internal ladder in good order, from director to executive vice president, and his accession was taken as settled; even so, the large orientations of the business still required the final sign-off of Nobuo, by then a senior adviser. Even a natural son, if he moves too fast on reforms that run against the founding spirit of aggressive expansion, may find his position unstable — the dynamics peculiar to an owner-managed company are visible in this personnel decision.

The way the affair was settled, through Nakabō Kōhei as an outside third party, is equally characteristic of this company. Nobuo took in the voices of his board, but would not deliver the verdict to his own son with his own mouth, entrusting it instead to a lawyer he had long known. The turn toward efficiency was in itself a rational response to the long headwind of a declining birthrate; that it was overturned because it was pursued too radically makes this an episode in which the speed of change and the building of consent were questioned more searchingly than the content of the change itself.