Honda just announced its first net loss since listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange — in 1957. Let that sink in. Nearly seventy years of profitability, and this is the year it ended. The company cancelled three EV models it had been engineering for years — writing off up to two and a half trillion yen in a single fiscal year. They calculated that a two and a half trillion yen write-down was better than launching into a market that had moved against the original business case.

That fact alone is worth sitting with. This is not a story about a company that failed to try. This is a story about the difference between boldness and prudence — and what happens when you have the first without the second…

When it comes to identifying their own successor, CEOs of foreign companies in Japan whom I know often find themselves in exile in a land of no good options. Yet it does not have to be so.