Out of the “structurally depressed” mold: Kume’s culture reform (1985)

You can change the culture, but the excess does not vanish

What set Kume Yutaka’s reform apart was that he reached into “the company’s constitution and culture” before financial restructuring. Cutting off a mindset that faced inward toward the company rather than toward the customer, and remaking it from forms of address, pay and labor relations upward, was an unusual sequence in a rebuild that tends to rush the surgery on the numbers. Anticipating trade friction, going early into Britain and putting down roots there with local management and a high local-procurement ratio — the “glocal” idea — also got ahead of what would later become common sense. The choice to change from consciousness and culture first can be seen, in itself, as farsighted.

Even so, changing the culture did not make the accumulated excess itself disappear. The heavy structure — surplus capacity above 700,000 units, a workforce over 50,000, accumulated losses across the affiliated dealer network — lay in a region that soft reform could not reach. Confidence returned inside the company, products hit, and the second-half operating result came back toward balance, yet the root of the structurally depressed constitution remained. Changing the culture alone does not erase the excess — this fact was preparing the next, more painful decisions: the Tsuji Yoshifumi regime that pushed into closing the Zama plant, and the Ghosn regime that carried out a sanctuary-free rebuild under the discipline of foreign capital.