Shedding the leasing trade for financial services (1989)

When changing the name is the strategy

What this decision shows is that changing a company’s name can itself be the language of strategy. Orient Leasing did not so much open a new market as declare, by changing what it called itself, the direction it intended to travel — to its own staff, to its customers and to the market. Every company proclaims diversification; few carry it to the point of rewriting the name on the register. That the pioneer of leasing took “Leasing” out of its own name carries a weight beyond the fact of a widened business: it put the question of how a company defines itself at the centre of management.

A new name does not, of course, guarantee new substance. ORIX was able to go on into life insurance, aircraft leasing and asset management, and eventually to become an investment company, because of the several years of diversification that preceded the change of name and because of the self-restraint Miyauchi Yoshihiko maintained throughout — never bet the company. Not one spectacular stroke but an accumulation of small decisions thickening the mix of businesses; the renaming was a declaration laid on top of that accumulation. How a company updates its own definition is a question still sitting in front of many others.