The turn to “bakusoku” management and the Miyasaka regime (2012)

A generational handover that severed the memory of success

The centre of this decision was not financial repair but severing, with a single stroke of generational change, the organisational inertia bred by success as a PC portal. The pulling power of 100 million page views a day, and the high advertising income it earned, were — turned inside out — a culture set hard around the PC screen, a weight that had slowed the shift to smartphones. Inoue, who by his own admission loved what he had spent sixteen years building and said he did not even carry a mobile phone, embodied the depth of that inertia. That Son chose speed of change over continuity of management, and bet on the 44-year-old Miyasaka and a young executive team, came from the judgment that an extension of the existing optimisation could never keep pace with the smartphone era.

That said, the order to move “at breakneck speed” was more than a cultural slogan: it came with a winnowing of 150 services down to 20, and a redesign that discarded self-reliance in favour of partnering with other firms. Concentrating people and capital on strong services and pulling out of fields it could not win showed up in high profit in the first year; but the severity of “be number one, or partner, or quit” also laid the road of “take scale by joining with outsiders” that would run on into the later tie-ups with CCC and Askul, and the integrations with Z Holdings and LINE. Bakusoku management, which tied generational change to strategic change, pushed Yahoo out into the smartphone era and, at the same time, was the entrance to a long transition — from a company that won everything by its own power to one that piled up alliances and reorganisations.