Exiting beer and selling two plants to Kirin and Sapporo (1967)

What it means to fold a cherished ambition

The weight of this decision does not fit inside the phrase “tidying up an unprofitable business.” What was being withdrawn from was the venture that Omiya Kurakichi — former chairman, and his adoptive father — had begun with the company’s fortunes staked on it. That Omiya Takashi, only just succeeded to the presidency, folded that ambition as the first act of his tenure is where the tension of this decision is concentrated. Fearing that taking time over a decision loses the opportunity, he pushed it through over objections all at once — a way of working he later looked back on with the word “one-man.”

That said, one can only assert that the withdrawal saved the company because one knows what came after. While letting go of beer and heading into contraction, the firm cut headcount on the one hand and set aside money for a laboratory that would not pay in the near term on the other. It was the judgment of that rebuilding period, defence and offence advancing together, that prepared both the revival of shochu and the seed of biotech. The quality of management shows less in the failure itself than in how the failure is folded up and what is planted next — Takara Shuzo’s exit from beer can be read as one instance of that.