The founder’s rebate scandal and a change of leadership (2007)

A founder’s magnetism, and the discipline of a listed company

The heart of this episode was not a financial collapse or a stall in the business, but the head-on collision between the private conduct of the founder who had built the company in a single generation and the discipline demanded of a listed company. The imagination to invent a system anyone could use and remake the secondhand-book market, and the carelessness of turning the standing won by that system to private gain, were the front and back of the same one man. Standing up an outside-only investigation committee under the direct authority of the audit board, and going as far as the founder’s resignation and a handover of representative authority, can be read as the decision of a company that had leaned on its owner’s magnetism choosing to let go of that very magnetism.

A used-goods buyback business is one in which discretion over cash, physical goods and appraisal tends to pool in the hands of the front line and of management; lacking discipline, it can become a breeding ground for private gain. The 2007 affair was the first to thrust that difficulty forward, and the same question recurs in changed form all the way to the internal fraud of 2024, when fake buybacks at the stores were called to account. A founder’s exceptional gifts and the need for a system to govern them are separate things — Takashi Sakamoto’s fall, and his comeback in a different trade, read as a case that pushed forward early a theme no company holding a successful founder-manager can avoid.