Mitsuya Kishida becomes president, and the shift to collective leadership (2024)

Choosing to hand over by system, not by reproducing the charismatic founder

The heart of this managerial decision was neither a response to financial crisis nor investment in a new business, but the design of succession — how to hand to the next generation a decision-making that had been concentrated, for half a century, in the founder as an individual. After a run of short-lived departures by executives brought in from outside to reproduce his own way of running the company, Shigenobu Nagamori let go of the idea of seeking a single “second Nagamori” and switched to a selection that set five vice-presidents in competition and to a collective leadership built around Mitsuya Kishida. In shifting his footing from reproducing an exceptional individual toward running the company by a system in which several executives support one another, one glimpses a rare posture of self-relativisation for a succession led by a charismatic manager.

Yet the two-headed structure, with a founder who retained representative authority running alongside, carried to the end the question of how much discretion to allow the successor president. That question moved toward resolution in an unforeseen form — the improper accounting that surfaced in 2025 and the subsequent resignation of Shigenobu Nagamori as a representative director — and real managerial power converged on Mitsuya Kishida. That the company had confronted early the task of loosening its dependence on the founder, while the problems rooted in that very corporate culture erupted midway through the handover, shows just how hard the succession of charismatic management is. The verdict on this decision — an attempt to open a concentration in one person into a system — appears to rest on how far the Kishida regime can achieve both the rebuilding of governance and continued growth.