He’d seen what needed to change. He just couldn’t get the building to agree with him in time.
Clayton Christensen has a theory for why companies survive their own growth. In the early years, a business runs on its people — the founders, the first engineers, whoever happened to be in the room when the big calls got made. Over time, if the company’s going to last, that has to shift. The business has to run on processes and values instead of whoever currently holds them.
Companies that never make that shift flame out the moment the founding team leaves. Christensen’s examples are blunt about this — soaring young companies that nail one hot product, go public, and then can’t do it again, because the founding team never built anything that could survive without them.
It’s a good argument.
But it skips a step that matters more than the theory lets on.
Christensen’s own case studies show how that shift from people to process actually happens. Employees live through a decision, watch it work, and start trusting the judgment behind it. Do that enough times and the judgment becomes a process. Do it long enough and the process becomes a value nobody even questions anymore.
The process gets earned, one lived decision at a time.
That’s the step Toshiba’s restructuring seems to have skipped, or at least rushed. Opposition like that rarely comes from people who think the destination is wrong. It comes from people who were never in the room while the road was being chosen.
There’s a difference between a process someone follows and a process someone defends.
A process you’re handed, you comply with — you do the minimum that keeps you covered, and wait to see if leadership actually means it this time. A process you helped build, you defend, because the outcome is already yours before it even ships.
Getting the diagnosis right is rarely what gets you fired.
You can have the right clock and still get thrown out of the building if nobody else helped build it.