Stepping down for Tamatsuka: a company that runs without its founder (2002)

A thriving founder tests management that runs without him

The heart of this decision was not a clean-up personnel move that pushed a failed business onto a younger person, but a successful founder trying to loosen his own dependence on his personal gravity. Yanai Tadashi, precisely because he was the strong founder who built Uniqlo in a single generation, saw that this same strength was also a weakness binding the company to the founder as an individual. Amid the headwind of falling profits, his choice to hand the presidency to the 39-year-old Tamatsuka Genichi and step back as chairman to cultivate the next generation of managers carries — like the judgment of JEOL’s Kazato Kenji, who moved to collective leadership at the height of good times — the character of a successful figure daring to step into self-negation.

That said, this “de-charisma” did not take root as a system. In Tamatsuka’s three years existing-store sales recovered and the ground was consolidated, but facing the aggressive management needed to compete in the world, Yanai himself returned to the presidency in 2005, and thereafter a one-headed structure of chairman-and-president continued. That the very man who preached generational change had to step to the front again as the most trustworthy manager shows how hard it is to break away from the charismatic founder.

The more a company thrives, the harder it is to recognize its strength — dependence on the founder — as a weakness. That Yanai Tadashi dared to move on generational change in a period of falling profits, and tried, with a young president, a management that would turn even failure to the next use, mirrors the difficulty and the subtlety of business succession: that a handover can be set in motion not at the peak of success but precisely at the moment of a stumble.