Replacing the board after the misconduct scandal and pivoting to content (2025)

From defending to being called to account

What Shimizu Kenji decided went beyond preventing a recurrence of the misconduct: he connected that reckoning to a rebuilding of the business model. He replaced every director but himself, dissolving a homogeneous organisation, and in the same movement set out a content-centred model that treats broadcast revenue as one part of an investment’s recovery. Locating the core of the problem in the organisation’s homogeneity — concluding that the successes of the 1980s onward had blocked adaptation — is what supported that order of operations.

It is far too early, though, to call the whole picture a success. Operating results are still in deficit, ratings sit fourth among the commercial networks, and 8% ROE remains a distant fiscal-2033 target. A company that once repelled a takeover with warrants and defended control by legal structure now stands, through its own misconduct, on the side being pressed by shareholders to restructure. What remained after using structure to block acquisition pressure was a question about the quality of the very management that structure had protected.