Author: Nicholas Benes

Here is an example of the sort of thing that can happen at mid-size companies in Japan. Let’s say that at the time when you join the company as an outside director, the son of the founder is the CEO.  The son is an engineer by training, but when his father became too old to lead the company, the son took his place. The son is the nicest, most gentle man in the world, but he does not have enough management experience or the character to serve as a decisive leader at a time of disruptive technological change.  It is clear to you that that he will have to step down, and the board will have to find someone from the outside who has more managerial experience and decisiveness.

At that point, your self-appointed job becomes “finding a soft, smooth way to persuade the CEO to step down”. 

As its sales increased, Alps had financed its growing working capital needs by borrowing from banks.  But no bank wanted to be a “main bank” for a small unlisted company any more. So every year or so we added another bank lending us 200 million yen or more, until we had something like six or seven different banks. All of these loans were short-term, and had to be “rolled over” each year.

As long as all the banks rolled over their loans each year, and we were able to find a new bank when we needed it, to the board, everything seemed fine.

Why do I think director training is so important to Japan’s future? Because I have seen so much of what goes wrong behind the scenes, and the losses and pain that are caused, when boards do not function well here. I have a lot of “scar tissue”, as we say in English.  What is really interesting, is how many commonalities there are in the causes for inadequate governance.  The size of the company, and its industry, really do not seem to matter. It is the reverse of Tolstoy’s quote, as if “all Japanese boards that succeed do so in a different way, but all boards that fail, do so in the same way”  If so, one would think this should make it easier to avoid governance failures.

My first experience as an outside director in Japan began in the year 2000, when the M&A advisory boutique that I led at that time, JTP Corporation, advised the US firm of MapInfo to conclude a strategic alliance and invest in a 25% capital raise by Alps Mapping in Nagoya.  Alps (as it was known in Japanese) was an unlisted firm that was the third largest map publisher in Japan, and had excellent map data.  The company was planning to go public at some time in the future.  Because MapInfo had no staff in Japan at the time, I was nominated by MapInfo to serve on the board of Alps going forward, to protect not only its interests but also those of  other shareholders, because MapInfo had no staff in Japan at the time.