Mori Masahiko’s succession, three years early (1999)

Capability, not bloodline, set the timing

What is essential in this decision is that in a house said to be living out “the last of family management,” the handover was accelerated by performance rather than by order of birth. Masahiko had not been kept in reserve as the heir: he learned commerce at Itochu, and after joining the company he earned the effective top job on his own account, through concrete results in overseas development and in shifting the business to cash settlement. That President Yukio brought the original timetable forward by three years can be read as an assessment of that capability. It is a case in which succession at a family firm was advanced not by the logic of the house but by a record as a manager.

The early start, however, came not on a following wind but at the entrance to a trial, with orders thinning at home and abroad. That a young manager took the helm holding up a long time horizon also laid the ground for the Mori Seiki that would go on, by way of an alliance with Germany’s GILDEMEISTER, to reorganize itself into DMG MORI on a global scale. Not a seat prepared by lineage but an accession hastened by capability was placed at the start of that long road to globalization. Family or ability, in choosing the next manager — Mori Seiki’s 1999 succession offers one answer to the question.