Going public, the founders’ retirement, and handing the company to an insider (2000)

The order in which a founder leaves

Munetsugu Tokuji was fifty-three, an age at which he could still have worked plenty. What catches the eye is the order: first he listed the shares and exposed the company to outside eyes, then he passed the presidency to his wife, then to a career employee, and last of all he removed himself from any position from which he could offer an opinion. Because a business run on five thousand working hours a year and a thousand comment cards a day depended on the founder as an individual, that dependence had to be unwound in stages.

That the sequence held to the end, though, was because Hamashima Toshiya came forward and asked to be made president from the following year — not because Munetsugu had raised a successor. He has said as much himself: he worked in a fever, and looked up one day to find there was someone he could leave it to. The man presented with the condition that representative authority be held by one person alone did not have many roads to choose from. The success of a succession may turn less on the manners of the one stepping down than on whether a person appears who will take it on.