The founder returns: ending the large-enterprise ERP push (2006)

What the founder came back to stop

What the three years from 2003 tested was not whether the company could build a product for large enterprises, but how far a company that hires no mid-career staff and does not expand its subcontracting can push its order book. OBiC7 EX had in fact been finished to a configuration that held up under 200 concurrent users, and neither revenue nor profit fell. What broke was the labour side: an evaluation system chasing quarterly numbers gathered orders faster than employees could be grown to serve them. When Noda Yoshihiro returned to the presidency in February 2006, what he stopped looks less like a product for large customers than a mechanism that sold without waiting for people to be ready.

A founder’s second turn is easily read as the founder shouldering a successor’s failure. In this company’s case, though, what Noda prepared over the following seven years was the person who would run the company after him, and the joined-up sales-and-engineering floor that person would operate. Tachibana Shoichi, summoned from Yokohama in 2005, became executive vice-president in 2007, vice-president in 2008 and president in 2013. When Tachibana said in 2024 that it had taken twenty years to get this far, those twenty years line up almost exactly with the period since February 2006, when Noda sat back down in the president’s chair.