Recruiting a foreign CEO: Christophe Weber and the shift to global management (2014)

A succession that severed management from nationality

The heart of this decision was that, to govern a business it had spread across the world, Takeda stepped into the internationalization of management itself. It had extended its operations globally by acquisition while failing to grow, from within, the executives to bind them together. Hasegawa and the board chose not to wait on in-house development but to bring in from outside a foreigner who knew the market well. Opening a management that founding family and lifers had carried for more than two centuries into a single post held regardless of nationality is what marks the character of this succession.

Recruiting from outside, however, sped the internationalization of the business while deferring the time it would take to raise the next chief at home. The Weber regime ran to about twelve years — a long tenure not easily changed even when results stalled. That Takeda entrusted the next CEO, in 2026, to another foreigner in Julie Kim is the flip side of the same fact. The fruit of globalization, and the unmet task of growing management talent in-house — the recruitment of a foreign chief left both behind at once.