Maeda’s reform: diagnosing a “big-company disease” (1987)

Can the model pupil diagnose its own disease?

The heart of this reform lies less in the earnings crisis itself than in the fact that Maeda located its cause not outside the company but inside it. The headwinds of the oil shocks and the strong yen blew equally on every fibre company. While many firms moved into non-fibre fields as if to escape them, Maeda took Toray’s slump on himself as a problem of the company’s own constitution — a “big-company disease.” His diagnosis, that able employees were assembled and yet did not connect to results, was one that a company which had been the model pupil could not deliver without doubting its own record of success.

That said, a reform that publicly declares one’s own illness and asks employees to leave comes with pain. One cannot assert that Maeda’s method of cutting the “critics” was always right, and Toray went on to post net losses again in the 2000s. Even so, the contrarian choice of the time — to stay in fibre — bore fruit in the carbon-fibre business nurtured over many years and in the tie-up with UNIQLO. How far can a successful company doubt the memory of its success? Maeda’s reform inscribes on Toray’s history both sides at once: the difficulty of self-transformation, and a rare case of carrying it through.