Good Risks: Discovering the Secrets to ORIX's 50 Years of Success

Chapter 6 Tokyo, the Global HQ

I had traveled around the world; I had heard many stories about this company and group of companies called ORIX. Everywhere I went I heard about “ORIX DNA” and “the ORIX Way” and Miyauchi-style management. I didn’t completely understand what it all meant, but I had seen with my own eyes the results of the ORIX approach to doing business. Companies from Dallas to New York to Dublin to Sydney were run by smart, driven, visionary people. There is an old saying that true leaders don’t create followers–they create more leaders. That is what I had seen in looking at ORIX around the globe—Miyauchi’s style led to picking smart young people, some of whom had never held a significant managerial position before, and making them into sparkplug CEOs, people who could fire up their teams and keep them pushing for bigger and better successes down the road.

There were still a hundred or more Group companies that I hadn’t visited and tens of thousands of employees I hadn’t yet interviewed, but I was growing impatient. It was just as well that I wouldn’t be going via China. It was time for me to go to the source. I needed to wind up my country-hopping and go meet ORIX on its home ground. I made up my mind to do two things: Find some way to talk to people at the Tokyo HQ who wouldn’t feed me PR crap, and do whatever I had to do to get to the top. No matter how difficult it might be, I wanted to at least meet Chairman Miyauchi. I knew it was too much to expect an ...