Extending new-hire training from two weeks to a full year (1993)

The education investment a loss made possible

An ordinary loss of ¥18.4 billion and three straight years of falling sales and profits were more than enough reason to cut staff. What Okasan extended instead was the time seventy-one new hires spent away from the floor. The condition that let the plan through was also the slump: with the Nikkei sunk to the mid-¥10,000s and branches not asking for reinforcements, the difficult negotiation among directors could be settled. Managing director Kato Tetsuo’s formulation — “change quality by volume” — was, it seems, the idea of moving the distribution through the sheer quantity of training at the entrance, rather than scolding individual salespeople.

No figures survive to show the effect of that education as a turn in performance. Six years later, the most chairman Kato Seiichi could say was that the firm had “come back to break-even.” Full commission deregulation in October 1999 and the entry of online-only brokers destroyed the premise of the revenue base on a plane entirely separate from the quality of salespeople, and by 2000 the second tier and below were caught in a pincer. What education could remake extended to the manners of selling — not to the shape of an income statement that depended on brokerage commissions.