Founder to son: handing over selling as a measurable system (2001)

What was inherited was not the selling, but the way of measuring it

Otsuka Minoru’s management was a line drawn by long experience and instinct: the 1975 product switch and the 1981 move into personal computers alike were decided by the president personally, over internal objection. What Otsuka Yuji worked on after joining was, by contrast, the internal information systems — and SPR, begun the moment he took office, is machinery for deciding by the numbers who should be offered what. It can be read as a succession that re-set the selling power his father had built into a form that keeps running when the person running it changes.

That re-setting did not, however, bear fruit in the year of the handover. The year ended December 2001 brought lower sales and lower net profit, and consolidated revenue would not pass one trillion yen for another twenty-three years. That seven years elapsed between the successor being named publicly in 1994 and the actual handover also says something about how hard the decision was for the man giving the company up. And the task Otsuka Yuji — who built a company that runs on systems — named as outstanding in 2025 was the cultivation of the next manager. The intractability of succession as a problem carried straight through to the second generation.