The Growth Zone Podcast
Exploring dauntless leadership and dramatic business growth. Each episode delivers strategies and tactics you can use to drive growth in your business in Japan, and beyond.
The greatest strategic risk is not being too bold. It is being bold in the wrong direction for too long — without the discipline to notice.
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. The Ohio factory had been retooled. The battery plant in Jeffersonville was ramping. The supply base had been structured. Honda came within months of the production line — and stepped back anyway. 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.
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