The reform run all at once — early retirement, merit pay, systems — then reversed (2003)

What you diagnose as the cause decides whether reform succeeds

The heart of this decision lay not in a stopgap for a financial crisis but in where it located the cause of a long slump. The management of the day traced the cause to rigidity in the organization and its systems, and believed that swapping out personnel, evaluation, pay, and systems all at once would set the company moving again. But the reason the sales floor would not sell did not lie in its systems alone. With the underlying diagnosis off the mark, prioritizing speed and thoroughness led the measures to erode employees’ trust — the opposite of their aim — and forced their withdrawal within four years.

Ironically, this failure shaped the management that followed. Behind President Hiroshi Aoi’s decision to make dialogue, rather than the replacement of systems, his central axis, there appears to have been a reckoning determined not to repeat the same mistake. Whether to change everything at once from the top, or to build agreement with the front line over time — one cannot say in the abstract which is right. Even so, Marui’s four years show a plain fact: get wrong “what you diagnose as the cause” before the substance of reform, and the more correct the prescription looks, the deeper the scar it leaves.