幫富士膠片“脫胎換骨”的助野健兒
數字技術的崛起讓富士膠片的核心業務面臨落伍危險，助野健兒幫助其開創了一條引人注目的全新發展軌跡。
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Fujifilm’s Kenji Sukeno: reinventing a brand The company president persuaded his workforce to embrace a more transparent approach © Charlie Bibby/FT Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save Save to myFT Sarah Neville, Global Pharmaceuticals Editor JANUARY 20, 2019 Print this page8 Kenji Sukeno, president of Fujifilm Holdings, has three of the company’s top selling cameras spread out in front of him. One, which delivers a print within seconds, bears the signature of Taylor Swift — a reminder that this venerable company can still produce a product with demonstrable appeal to the “selfie generation”. But since the turn of the century, Mr Sukeno, who joined the group more than 40 years ago, has helped to set a dramatic new trajectory, as the spread of digital technology threatened to render its core business close to obsolete. Its expertise, acquired through decades as one of the leading global photographic companies, has been harnessed to build a substantial presence in two distinct, but connected, businesses: life sciences and cosmetics. The challenge he and the leadership team faced was to persuade a workforce accustomed to guarding the company’s proprietary technology from competitors to embrace a far more transparent approach. It also needed to find new markets through a spate of targeted acquisitions. As early as the mid-1980s the company became “acutely aware” of how disruptive the rise of digital technology would be, says Mr Sukeno, and started “taking measures”. In any conversation about companies’ ability to ride out digital disruption, the name of Fujifilm’s US rival Eastman Kodak inevitably looms large: its failure to press home an initial advantage on digital photography, eventually leading to a bankruptcy protection filing in 2012, has earned it an unwelcome place in the management textbooks. It was not a mistake that Mr Sukeno and his company would make. As the millennium dawned, he says, it was clear that demand for conventional film was going to disappear in the next 10 years. “So that’s when we faced the crisis,” he adds. In 2004 the company began an “inventory check of Fujifilm’s technological expertise . . . We started researching which areas we should go into in order to survive, leveraging technology,” Mr Sukeno says. Underpinning this approach was a conviction that it could not accomplish its turnround sufficiently rapidly if it sought simultaneously to repurpose its technologies and to create new markets: it must acquire a new customer base through M&A. Mr Sukeno encapsulates how the company was thinking at the time: “We are trying to climb the mountain, but if you go from the bottom all the way to the peak, it’s going to take a long time. So we will charter a helicopter, which will take us to somewhere close to the peak.” The sum it has invested in M&A “for the helicopter”, he adds with a smile, stands at about ¥1tn ($9bn). All of the businesses into which it has expanded post-2000 are linked to its materials science capabilities, acquired from years of making photo film. If the business strategy was achieved through hard-headed acquisition and partnership, convincing the staff that a change of tack was vital demanded diplomacy and a human touch. “In the old days we were concentrating on making something better than other companies,” he says. With only a few players in the field “there was an oligopoly. So if we came up with a new product then, the world had to buy that product,” he says. As digital technology disrupted the company’s model, he realised that “a mindset change” was required: the company must become attuned to the needs of its potential customers and actively seek to come up with solutions to their problems. Recommended The Big Read Why Japan Inc is gambling on M&A growth Under the guidance of Shigetaka Komori, Fujifilm’s chairman, a strategy to win over employees was devised. “We were acutely aware that this was very difficult [for staff], but we persuaded people that if we didn’t do what we were planning to do, then we would not be able to survive.” Mr Sukeno’s pitch was clear. “What I suggested was that we open Fujifilm’s technical capability to the world, so that the world can look at it and then come to us saying, ‘If we combine Fujifilm’s technology and our technology, we can come up with this particular solution’. This is what I suggested to them.” Scientists in the R&D division were the toughest to persuade “because I think they understood, but their heart wasn’t quite with it”, given their history of “black box” development of products, he says. The result is a company reborn. In the financial year that ended in 2001, 19 per cent of revenue came from photographic film. By 2018 that had dwindled to just 1 per cent. Meanwhile, “photo-related” services, including digital cameras, made up 16 per cent of revenue in the year to March 2018 — compared with 54 per cent 17 years earlier. Along the way there has been pain for employees who have lost their jobs — including 10,000 who went in the restructuring of Fuji Xerox, a joint venture between Fujifilm and Xerox, in 2018 — and uncertainty for remaining staff who have had to integrate new colleagues with different skills into the workforce. Mr Sukeno says that the key to managing the post-merger integration was “to communicate with the new companies with respect and share [a] clear goal and vision”. Another leadership challenge he faced was the discovery in 2017 of accounting irregularities at its sales subsidiaries in New Zealand and Australia. Soon after the problem was revealed, he says, Fujifilm set up both internal and independent external investigations. A series of governance changes followed, including integration of the accounting divisions of Fujifilm and Fuji Xerox into Fujifilm Holdings. He says he sought personally to reinforce the company’s “open, fair and clear” corporate culture at compliance sessions held for the management of each Fujifilm Group company. However, the episode seems to have exposed a need to spell out the ethos more directly: “Out of this, we learnt that making communication more active among managers and non-managers, departments and organisations, and all employees, would be important for the further growth of the Fujifilm Group,” he adds. One current piece of attempted M&A is proving less than plain sailing. A year ago a deal which would have seen Fujifilm merge with Xerox, the printer and photocopying company, was announced, only to hit the rocks after two of its biggest investors fiercely opposed the tie-up. Mr Sukeno makes clear that he is still hoping the deal will proceed — the company would be “be better off with this transaction” — even as he insists that it is “not something absolutely necessary for Fujifilm’s growth”. He seems prepared to play a waiting game, adding: “We don’t expect to spend time on this forever, but we are in no rush.” Hovering over the conversation is the ghost of Kodak. Asked about the differences between the companies, he suggests they go beyond the simple fact of Fujifilm’s more focused strategy: there is an element that reflects the very different approaches to the role of business in society. In the US, he suggests, when technologies that support a company’s core business become obsolete “the general thinking goes [that] this company should also disappear . . . The investment made into this company should be repatriated to the investors, and then the investors should invest in other emerging companies with the new technology.” The thinking in Japan is different, he says: “The company’s very much seen as the vehicle which supports other people’s lives.” Three questions for Kenji Sukeno Who is your leadership hero? Nobunaga Oda [a feudal lord, 1534-1582]. He denied traditional authority in the Middle Ages of Japan and, through his innovative policies, made the foundation of Japan’s modernisation. He is a medieval innovator. What would you be doing if you were not president of Fujifilm? When I was young, I wanted to be an orchestra conductor. I bought and collected full scores of symphonies and concertos, listened to music on vinyl records while reading the score, and imitated prominent conductors. What was the first leadership lesson you learnt? My first leadership lesson has shaped my business motto: “be bold on the big decisions, and meticulous on the small decisions” from a Japanese proverb. When working on a big job, I always try to be bold because I learnt that we may sometimes miss the very best timing for making a drastic decision if we give too much attention to detail. On the other hand, when it comes to daily business, you need to specifically allocate your mind to the details, otherwise you will end up walking into pitfalls.
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