From the founding family’s third generation to a professional manager (2022)

What opening up the family business left behind

The heart of the 2023 change of president, beyond any judgment of good or poor results, can be read as opening the command of a company that had begun as a family trade to someone outside the founding family. Pola — started by an individual in 1929, splitting making from selling, and handed down within the family through a second and third generation — had, on acquiring the vessel of a holding company, changed shape into a collective binding many brands together. Entrusting the role of leading that collective to a professional manager who had walked the overseas business looks like a decision to fit the form of management to a scale and variety that the extension of a family trade could no longer carry.

That said, as long as Satoshi Suzuki remains on the board as a chairman who holds representative authority, it is not yet possible to declare that the founding family’s influence has faded. How far the two layers — the family standing on the side of ownership and oversight, a professional manager carrying execution — become a real division of roles will come into view through the results and decisions still to come. How to draw a collective of brands, each with its own character, together under a single will, and how to give shape to the global expansion it has proclaimed — heading toward 2029, the company’s centenary, the task entrusted to the professional manager remains open.