Kazuo Inamori and the rebuild under bankruptcy (2010)

A logic other than the prosperity of a national carrier

What this rebuild showed, one can argue, is that a company’s life or death turns not on the size of its sales but on whether it can hold a structure that earns. The “world number one” of the semi-governmental era was a prosperity handed down not by competition but by institutional design, and once the shelter was gone only the weight of fixed costs remained. The amoeba management and philosophy that Kazuo Inamori brought in worked precisely because they broke that weight down into the profitability of each unit and the consciousness of each individual, so that the front line could make the cuts itself. Choosing a manager who rewrites an organization’s operating principles rather than an aviation specialist was, in the end, what set the speed of the rebuild.

That said, the high earnings out of bankruptcy owed something to a “turnaround premium” — debt compressed under the rehabilitation plan, a lighter tax burden — and this cannot be denied. Even so, sustaining a high level for seven consecutive years shows the structural shift was not a one-off. Could JAL become a company that makes money even out of the government’s hands? To that question these seven years, for the time being, returned an answer. And the financial base built up here would become the resource that supported the second crisis, the COVID pandemic, soon to arrive.