UNMASKING THE NEW NORMAL
Kikkoman’s Chairman Yuzaburo Mogi reflects on how the food giant is adapting to pandemic realities to emerge stronger and more resilient.
The year 2020 will long be remembered for the havoc that Covid-19 wreaked on the global economy. Restaurants were among the hardest hit, either closing or shifting to takeout only. Even today, the food service business in general is facing serious trouble. Yet certain strong brands seem to have fared better than others. A good case in point is global food giant Kikkoman Corporation.
“Of course, the pandemic seriously affected restaurant sales, which especially impacted our wholesale business,” says Chairman of the Board and Honorary CEO Yuzaburo Mogi. “As people shifted to eating at home, consumers naturally turned to brands that they know and trust. Thanks to support from individual customers worldwide, our sales figures remained relatively solid.”
The always-affable Mogi seems to have taken the coronavirus crisis in stride, but in fact he is quite concerned about its longterm implications: “The pandemic has put us in a unique position. No one really knows what the future will look like. Employees don’t know what to expect, so they look to management for guidance. This is a time for strong leadership. Senior management shouldn’t make unilateral decisions, but should leverage the wisdom of the company as a whole. In Japan, we trust in bottom-up management. That means leaders listen to ideas from every department, consult with their senior strategy staff, and then determine the best way forward.”
That sounds reasonable, but errors in judgment are inevitable. What if top management makes a serious mistake?
Mogi’s response is simple and direct: “It happens. In that case, you sit down with your strategy team, look at the situation objectively, and adjust your plan quickly.”
He goes on to discuss a number of changes that the “corona shock” has brought to Japanese companies.
“How should we train our staff now?” he asks rhetorically. “Before Covid-19, everyone learned about their job, and about business in general, through informal, one-on-one talks with a mentoring superior. Now, there is much less direct communication. People are meeting virtually, not going out drinking with their mentors. So now we have to formalize something that was never formal, and create a new structure to handle ‘informal’ training. I’m not sure the new approach will be as effective.”
Companies everywhere are struggling to anticipate the post-pandemic “new normal.” What does Mogi think will happen when the crisis is over?
“One thing I can say for certain is that things will not go back to the way they were before. For example, each company handled telework differently, so their responses in the post-pandemic era will also vary from company to company. When the pandemic ends, we will not give up telework, but we will need to seriously consider how many of our staff should be in our offices and how many should be working remotely.
“What is the ideal ratio? I don’t know, but I do know that telework is here to stay.”
What else will change?
“The new normal will look a lot like precorona days, but with important differences. One of the biggest is the way that we think about risk,” he says.
After more than 300 years in business, Kikkoman has dealt with almost every external risk a company can face, so what is he getting at? Mogi replies that resilient firms learn from experience and become stronger and smarter.
“Covid one day may be gone, but something like it could appear again. Every few years some new virus might sweep across the globe. While that was always a possibility before, now it is a reality. All business entails risk, so strong, resilient companies will learn to adapt and deal with it. The new normal will be different from the past, but business will go on.”