Cross-cultural communication （163）　

163) The Genius of Entrepreneurship!
At the end of 2024, I read “The Genius of Business!” by Yasuyuki Ohnishi, published by Shincho-sha. The genius in question is Hiroshi Ezoe. When I hear the name Ezoe, the only image that comes to mind for my generation is the negative one associated with the so-called Recruit Scandal of the late 1980s, where he provided shares of Recruit's newly listed stock to a prominent politician. However, this non-fiction book completely dispelled that image.

Ezoe began his career while still a student at the University of Tokyo, where he excelled in advertising sales for the university newspaper. After graduating in 1960, he did not join any company but instead founded “University Newspaper Advertising Agency,” an extension of his student-era part-time work. From there, his meteoric rise began.
Previously, job advertisements were simply limited information about companies published in large-circulation publications. Ezoe conducted surveys to determine what kind of information students wanted from companies, and then used this information to help companies enhance their advertisements, creating a two-way communication method. Of course, this type of job recruitment magazine was the first of its kind in Japan, and possibly the world. The author, Ohnishi, refers to this new strategy as “the paper Google.” Even this alone was remarkable, but in the 1980s, the company purchased multiple supercomputers, established data centers in New York and London, and built a system capable of exchanging information 24 hours a day. Recruit's own job postings, following Ezoe's philosophy, did not ask about academic background or gender, but only assessed candidates' motivation during interviews. His final line was, “You have spent your lives learning from history and knowledge. From now on, you will be the ones creating history.” This was typical of Ezoe, who graduated from the Faculty of Education at the University of Tokyo. He seemed to know exactly how to motivate people. However, when it came to introducing supercomputers and expanding globally, he placed a strong emphasis on employees' expertise in their respective fields and recruited elite graduates from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo.

However, this rapid rise seemed to cause unease and concern among the major figures in the manufacturing-centric business world at the time. When Ezoe met with a prominent member of the Keidanren (Japan Business Federation) at the time, he was reportedly told to his face, “What you're doing is a hollow business.” Ezoe, who was too far ahead of his time, had few supporters outside of his original employees from the founding days. This led to an incident where shares of the newly listed company were provided to a powerful politician (in reality, they were not gifted but purchased with loans from a subsidiary financial institution), and through excessive media manipulation, public opinion was swayed, resulting in a guilty verdict.
After this, Ezoe never appeared in the public eye again, but Recruit continued to grow, acquiring the global job recruitment company Indeed and becoming a world-class enterprise.

Finally, here is the cross-cultural communication lesson from this story. A person with no overseas study experience created a global information system specializing in job recruitment that rivals today's GAFA companies, all based on domestic experience, before the internet era. This achievement is certainly worthy of praise, but Ezoe was so focused on his own ideas that he failed to realize that other entrepreneurs could not keep up with his thinking. Even among compatriots, his approach and methodology were “cross-cultural.” Therefore, if Ezoe had recognized this himself or if someone had advised him, the tragedy that befell him might have been avoided. “Even a genius needs cross-cultural communication to protect themselves, even in their own country.” With that, I will conclude this discussion.

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