Abandoning dual-track management to narrow onto cancer — Nakayama Joji’s selection and concentration (2015)

The author’s view

The essential point of this pivot can be read not in the boldness of striking out into a new field, but in the thoroughness of the withdrawal — in how much of what had been spread out the company was willing to let go. The risks it had recoiled from at Ranbaxy, dependence on a single product and vast investment, remained in altered form whether it continued in generics or narrowed to innovative drugs. Nakayama Joji folded a two-front war he was unlikely to win and chose to gather resources into the ground he knew. The judgement to roll back, himself, a business he had widened under four pillars points to a subtlety of management: it is harder to fold a banner than to raise one.

Even so, it is difficult to read from the materials available at the time any necessity in cancer being where he narrowed to. That the ADC research kept quietly alive inside the company grew into a global blockbuster owed something to the soundness of the technology, but also, it seems, to no small amount of luck. Selection and concentration, had it missed, would have been remembered as plain retreat; that it is told as an act of foresight is inseparable from the success of Enhertu. Rather than the rightness of an ideal, the truth of this pivot may lie closer to the coincidence of a decision to withdraw and a technology worth nurturing happening to meet.