The Kitaoka reforms against “perennial third place” — undone by a semiconductor misjudgment (1994)

A reformer tripped up in his own field of strength

What stands out in this decision is that the direction was right but the footing to support it was not there. The idea of using selection-and-concentration to change a corporate culture that had settled comfortably into perennial third place broadly anticipated the path Mitsubishi Electric would later walk. Yet President Kitaoka, on principle refusing to build academic cliques or factions, kept no inner circle of his own and drove the reforms on his leadership alone. In a structure where a reformer is easily isolated, he was in the end tripped up in semiconductors — the very field he had come from — and in that lies the bitterness of this decision.

The irony is that the era’s frame of protecting employment may itself have hastened the setback. Kitaoka later regretted not moving sooner to wind down loss-making overseas plants, but out of regard for jobs he had put off that decision. Management that tries to protect what must be protected turns, in a crisis, into slowness to move — and Mitsubishi Electric would not confront this contradiction head-on until the later years when selection-and-concentration was pushed further still. The Kitaoka reforms can be seen as an attempt placed at the entrance of that long process.