Founding TKC as a shared computing bureau for accounting firms (1966)

A company built to defend, not to attack

What marks this founding decision out is that it looks less like an offensive venture going after a new market than like a company set up to protect the work of its founder and his fellow professionals. In the middle of his fight with the authorities, Iizuka Takeshi learned first-hand how precarious the footing of the accounting profession was. Onto that came the wave of computerisation he had seen in the West, and with it the prospect that staying manual would sweep the whole occupation away. That the words “defence of the professional domain” were placed first in the articles of incorporation was surely because those two experiences pointed to the same conclusion.

That a company begun in defence would go on growing for half a century was not, however, foreseeable at the outset. A design based on shared use invites losses unless the customers are there in numbers, and losses did indeed accumulate in the early years. Only once the mechanism of a membership organisation — drawing customers inside the business — began to work did two narrowly defined customer groups turn from narrowness into depth. Whether defining your business territory tightly at the start becomes a strength or a constraint is a question this company would be handed back again and again, in later decisions about diversification and in its changes of president.