The curse of the second installment

The Matrix Reloaded, Blues Brothers 2000, Speed 2. Cinema history is littered with the wreckage of sequels that failed to live up to the original. In the business world, the pressure on a successor is even more intense. How do you follow a “legendary” founder without crashing the ship?

Typically, if a company survives long enough to pass the torch, the founder is almost certainly a person of legendary talent. However, to adapt to a changing world, the successor is often required to reject the very methods that made the founder successful. This pressure is unimaginable—especially since founders are rarely the type to sit quietly in the background. The same “strong ego” that made them successful usually prevents them from letting go. Our founder at CondeHouse was no exception; his will was a force of nature, and I bow in respect to the hardships our second president must have endured.

That said, now that our second president has become the Chairman, I often see him doing the exact same thing to our third and current president. It seems the cycle of “the strong-willed predecessor” is a hard one to break, so perhaps I shouldn’t praise him too much!

The audacious logic of the U.S. launch

Despite the internal pressures, the second president proved his mettle early on. In 1984, while still in his 30s, he was sent to the U.S. to establish our branch office. His first move was a calculated gamble: he overhauled the entire Corporate Identity (CI). He gathered a team of experts and rebuilt the brand name, logo, and store interiors—all without the approval of our “hot-blooded” founder back in Japan.

In the mid-80s, when “Systematic Branding” was a foreign concept in Japan, this move was a masterclass in cold, hard logic. He knew that to win in the American market, we needed to speak their visual language. He showed the nerves of a high-stakes gambler backed by the brain of an architect.

The art of the defensive pivot

As Sun Tzu suggested in The Art of War, defense is much harder than offense. While the second president was brilliant at expansion, his true value emerged during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

When the Japanese economy spiraled, he didn’t panic; he calculated. Everything was judged through the lens of logic. He made the surgical decision to drastically cut labor costs, beginning with his own salary. While 16,000 Japanese companies collapsed that year, CondeHouse remained standing. He proved that sometimes, the most emotional thing you can do for your employees is to remain perfectly unemotional in your judgment.

The logic of embracing the irrational

Once, I asked him, “Even logic can’t predict the future perfectly. How do you decide when the data is unclear?”

He grinned and gave me a surprisingly “illogical” answer: “If someone comes back for approval after being rejected three times, I give them the green light—even if my logical brain says ‘No’.”

In his world, even human passion and “irrational persistence” are factored into the equation. He understands that a company cannot grow on logic alone, but it cannot survive on passion alone either. After the feverish, chaotic early years under our founder, it was the second president’s unwavering logic that finally laid the tracks for our long-term growth.

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A company, like a piece of furniture, is a living history of tradition and rebellion. Why not own a design that represents that same balance—respecting the roots of the past while boldly embracing the logic of the future?

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