NP21: breaking the walls inside the company, and returning to record profit (2002)

The walls that an extreme crisis broke

The core of this decision lies in the fact that, in the extremity of his predecessor’s sudden death and of confronting his own life expectancy, he located the cause of the slump not in the economy but in the walls inside the company, and carried out simultaneously the two things that had been treated as sacred: workforce reduction and the reorganization of a vertically divided structure. In a company where the presidency had passed among bankers and administrators, Suzuki, from the production side and outside the mainstream, pushed reform through without being bound by the existing dynamics. Cutting into the voluntary redundancies that his predecessors had been unable to touch, while binding the organization in one direction with the aggressive goal of being first in the world in constant-velocity joints, is where the character of this revival can be seen.

That said, a top-down reform sustained by the tenacity of a man fighting illness owed much to the will of one strong individual. The speed with which walls are broken in a crisis draws praise; how to continue that speed as an institution in ordinary times remains the next problem. The drive components symbolized by constant-velocity joints would become, alongside bearings, the axis of NTN’s subsequent global expansion. How to hand on to the post-crisis organization the power that a crisis gathered into one person — NTN’s revival from 2002 contains that question.