Proposing the C&C vision: fusing computers and communications (1978)

What one vision gives to diversification

At the heart of this decision was the question of how to bind a diversified business together under a single meaning. In none of its fields — telecommunications, semiconductors, computers — did NEC have the strength to aim single-handedly for the top of the world, and so it could not afford to nurture each of them separately. What chairman Koji Kobayashi packed into the three letters “C&C” was the idea of not lining the businesses up as an addition but multiplying them through one technological view — the fusion of computers and communications. The work of this proposal, one could say, lay in making it possible to speak of the way individual products and technologies lift one another — to employees, customers and investors alike — in the same words.

That said, the power of one vision to guide diversification is tested as the times change. The account C&C gave in the 1980s had the force to bind the businesses together while semiconductors, PCs and communications were all growing; but once the profitability of each field diverged from the 1990s on, the same banner also carried a tendency to dull the pruning of the business. Even so, when a company of limited resources faces the world, the task of holding a single logic that runs through its separate businesses still remains, in changed forms, today. C&C appears to have become a reference point that later managements returned to again and again — an attempt by a diversified company to give meaning to its own breadth.