The handover to Naofumi Takenaka: moving beyond the Inoue era (2024)

How to stand on your own out of a long shadow

The difficulty of this succession lies not in performance but in inheriting the pull of a leader. Noriyuki Inoue was the great restorer who led Daikin to the top of the air-conditioning world, and that very experience of success can become, for the next generation, a shadow hard to step out of. To go through with the handover in the midst of record results can be read as a decision to send off a new generation while momentum was still there, rather than moving only once the numbers had begun to tilt. Just as JEOL sought deliberately to let go of its founder’s centripetal pull, how to succeed a successful manager is a weighty question common to many companies.

That said, a lineup in which the previous generation remains as honorary chairman and as chairman and CEO is also a transitional form, wavering between standing alone and being watched over. The “succession and evolution” that Naofumi Takenaka has set out cannot hold by merely guarding the management he inherited, nor by hastily painting it over. How the next generation builds a new way of binding the company together in place of thirty years of centripetal pull — the handover at the hundred-year mark is at the stage of showing the answer to that question only from here on.