Driving Results

4A Prelude for Change

IN SEPTEMBER 2009, following a presentation I made to the Bridgestone Board in Japan on corporate governance, I was told that the current CEO for Bridgestone Americas would be retiring in early 2010. I was asked to assume the position of CEO upon his retirement. As the general counsel and chief compliance officer for Bridgestone Americas, I led the law department, which consisted of about 80 people and a multi‐million‐dollar budget, mostly for handling litigation against the company. Now, I was being asked to run a 55,000‐person global company with nearly $11 billion in revenues.

Bridgestone Americas was not a perfect company. No company is. It consisted of good people who worked hard and who were ethical and who took great pride in giving to their communities. However, the company operated in a very mature, extremely competitive industry. For all industry participants, it was essentially a fistfight to eke out better performance than its competitors. It was tough going. But Bridgestone shareholders, like all shareholders, wanted even stronger returns. Because Bridgestone Americas was the single largest part of Bridgestone globally, that naturally meant it had to obtain stronger returns than it had been achieving.

So, I was asked to take the company to the next level. This is what chief executive officers are supposed to do, but that is no small task. Opportunities like that don't happen every day. So, I overcame my fear of failure, accepted the offer, ...