Eiko Kōno becomes Recruit’s third president (1997)

What a “salarywoman” who climbed the ladder on merit asks

The heart of this succession was not simply the arrival of a woman executive but that Recruit — which had leaned on the founder’s individuality and charisma — entrusted management to a home-grown sales veteran who had climbed the ladder on merit. After the upheavals of Ezoe’s magnetism, the Recruit scandal and life under Daiei, what was called for was not a flashy founding spirit but the skill of a practitioner who had gone on making the numbers on the front line. That President Naotaka Ida named Kōno after settling the crisis, and that Kōno had answered with rising sales and profits as vice-president, shows this succession stood on an accumulation of results rather than on emotion or novelty.

That said, this article dates from just after Kōno took office, and how far the tasks she set would be realized still lay beyond its range. Even so, Kōno’s concerns — converting to a revenue structure that repaid borrowings with operating profit rather than relying on real estate, a review bold enough to halve the existing businesses, and alliances with other firms including abroad — can be seen to have named early the direction in which Recruit would later change shape: from magazines to net services, and on to a growth company built around overseas M&A. How a manager who should be judged by ability rather than gender would remake a company in a rebuilding phase — this article, written at the moment of her appointment, quietly poses that question.