Insight: Dynamic CEOs defy Japan Inc's decline
By Linda Sieg and James Topham
TOKYO | Mon Apr 2, 2012 6:06pm EDT
TOKYO (Reuters) - When Yusaku Maezawa quit playing drums in a punk band to devote himself full-time to his business selling Tokyo street fashion on the Internet, his main goal was to have fun.
Twelve years later, Maezawa, 36, is the billionaire CEO of online fashion retailer Start Today, one of a clutch of growing firms led by a different breed of executives determined to avoid the errors of the global Japanese brands whose faltering fortunes are making Japan Inc synonymous with decline.
"I was in danger of becoming a 'salaryman musician'," Maezawa said in an interview at his company headquarters in a high-rise office building outside Tokyo, where framed T-shirts hand-sprayed by company executives with letters spelling out "NO WAR" adorn the entrance.
"On the other hand, the company was growing dynamically, I was meeting new people to work with and I heard customers were happy, so it felt like there was more dynamism and growth," added Maezawa, who named his firm for an album by punk band Gorilla Biscuits.
The company, which now has about 400 full-time employees, expects operating profits to rise by more than 46 percent to 8.56 billion yen ($104 million) in the year just ended.
Maezawa, whose firm listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange's start-up section in 2007 and graduated to the first section in February, may be rare in preaching fun as a management gospel.
"I want to destroy the old concept that a company is a place where one sacrifices time for the sake of money," he said with an impish grin, confessing he now works a four-day week.
But his commitment to innovation and a laser-like focus on making consumers happy are shared traits experts agree set off Japan's emerging successes from once-proud but now-struggling firms such as Sony and Panasonic.
And it's not just those storied electronics groups that are at risk of being left behind in today's fast changing world. The stock market barometer, the Nikkei average, has dropped 74 percent from the heady highs of late-1989.
"Many people just rely on their past success, but things are moving and changing so fast, you need to self-innovate," Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of e-commerce operator and Amazon rival Rakuten Inc, told Reuters in a telephone interview as he travelled by car through Tokyo.
"Even Rakuten, if we stop, I think we are going to decline very rapidly. That's the new rule of the game," said Mikitani, whose firm, set up in 1997, now employs over 7,000 people and posted group operating profit of 71.34 billion yen last year.
Experts say more such success stories - found in sectors ranging from retail, Internet and mobile games to niche manufacturers - could help revive a Japanese economy stuck in the doldrums for decades and saddled with an ageing population.
Maezawa is a high school graduate; Mikitani studied at Harvard Business School. Several stand-out CEOs founded start-ups but others built up a family business or head an established firm.
What these executives do have in common, though, is an individualism rare in Japan's often staid business circles.
"Japanese society is changing and independent types are increasing, and every year more people are trying venture businesses," said Tatsuyuki Negoro, a professor at Waseda University's IT Strategy Institute.
"The question is whether things can change in time before Japan sinks."
1-3
