The founder steps down and hands the firm to Hagihira Kazumi of McKinsey (2012)

Why the founder chose to leave the management before the capital

The distinguishing feature of this handover is its order. When the founder of an owner-run company withdraws, the sale of the shares usually comes first and the transfer of management follows the movement of capital. Eguchi did the opposite: he kept his shares and passed only the management to an outsider. Handing the company to Hagihira ten months after he joined can be read as a judgment that bringing in someone who already knew how to run an upstream consultancy was faster than spending years growing a successor internally. Given that the capital side caught up two years later in the buyout, the 2012 change reads as the designed first step of an exit.

At the same time, those four and a half years showed the limits of an outside executive. Under Hagihira revenue kept rising while profit fell and then turned to loss; the conversion of the earnings structure was not completed during his tenure. The company became highly profitable only from the year to February 2017, when Abe’s regime turned both wheels — hiring and rates — together. Even so, the staffing practice without vertical silos was preserved through the Hagihira years and fed into the later single-pool system; seen that way, what this succession achieved lies less in the numbers than in moving the founder toward the exit without breaking the shape of the company.