Founding Hikari Tsushin on telecom deregulation, and designing the door-to-door model (1988)

Not what to sell, but how to sell it

The core of Hikari Tsushin’s founding was that it made the system for selling, not the goods being sold, its source of competitive advantage. Home telephones, long-distance calls, copiers, and later mobile phones — the merchandise changed hand over hand. What did not change was the face-to-face sales force that reached small firms and individuals on foot, the database that raised its efficiency, and a merit-based personnel system that moved people on results alone. That Shigeta asked from the outset for “the organisation and the mechanism that produce the most results” shows that this began not as a company that sells products but as a company that designs the power to sell. The idea of treating the sales channel as an asset was already at its core at the moment of founding.

This design philosophy recurs at every turning point that followed. The method of attacking the fragmented small-business market through the Town Pages directory lived on unchanged in the 2003 rebuild around copiers, and passed into the 2010s diversification that swapped one line of goods for another on the same channel. At the same time, sales and quotas that demand results without mercy also produced the shadow of the 2000 HITSHOP fake contracts. The doubleness by which one and the same mechanism becomes both the engine of growth and the breeding ground of crisis was built into the founding design from the start. A company that set out by pushing “how to sell it” to its limit grows large — and stumbles — for that very reason: the history of Hikari Tsushin shows how the whole of what followed was folded into the single opening move of its founding.