“It’s more than, ‘Go for it’. [It’s more like], ‘Don’t be afraid of failure. Be persistent and go for the big challenges. Don’t give up’.”
Makiko Ono is trying to describe the concept of yatte minahare, a fundamental part of the corporate philosophy of Japan drinks company Suntory Holdings. There is no precise translation in English, she explains. If she were not too modest to make the connection, her own four-decade-long career within Suntory might be a good illustration.
Last year, Ono became one of Japan’s few female chief executives when she was elevated to the top position at Suntory Beverage & Food, a listed unit of the drinks conglomerate.
She thought she had reached the end of the management road, having become Suntory’s head of sustainability in January 2022, aged 61. It is the sort of position that often marks the glass ceiling for women in corporate Japan. She says it was “a big surprise” to be promoted to chief executive of Suntory Beverage & Food, which controls brands such as Orangina and Lucozade in Europe and a range of mineral water, coffee, tea and health drinks in Japan and Asia, and runs a bottling joint venture with PepsiCo in the US.
Would she have been disappointed if someone else had been named to the top job?
“Very tough question,” Ono responds, pausing before adding: “I never thought of being CEO . . . but if somebody else would be in the role . . . I might feel disappointed.” Frustrated? “Not frustrated . . . Not fully satisfied, but not dissatisfied.”
Ono did face such disappointment early in her career and bounced back. In 1982, just after joining Suntory, she was assigned to the team that led the first successful bid by a Japanese company for a French winery, Château Lagrange in the Bordeaux region. The experience gave her a taste for fine wine and the goal of a full posting in France.
“I told my boss I had this aspiration. The boss knew that. But at that time in Suntory group, no female employees [were] working abroad. Of course, there were already some male [staff] in the main countries. And [the] HR division at the time, they were not so willing to send a female outside Japan.” When a job did come up at Suntory France, it went to a male colleague.
This setback, she admits, was frustrating. Ono had selected Suntory in part for the international opportunity. Based on a love of bossa nova dance music, she studied Portuguese at Tokyo’s University of Foreign Studies. But she also felt it was more progressive than other Japanese companies. It stood out in having female staff handling its recruitment presentations for female candidates, for instance.
Yet at root, the group at that time was still “very, very ‘old generation’”. Ono reacted to the France decision as many Japanese women would have done: “I didn’t protest, but I think I took it for granted. This is a Japanese company. But of course, I continued to have the aspiration.”
By 1991 she was working in Paris for Suntory France, the group’s first female expat: yatte minahare.
Ono’s tenacity and persistence seem to have marked her out from other women in 1980s corporate Japan, when female staff were expected to quit their job once they married. Four other women joined Suntory’s international division with Ono in 1982. “We were asked ‘How long do you want to work in this company?’ My colleagues, they replied, three years. And I replied, five years.”
In reality, Ono, who is single, outdid that modest ambition by some way, and is now into her fifth decade with Suntory.
In France, she added opera to her passions before returning home in 1997. “After coming back to Japan, I realised the experience of working in real business, I mean inside the business, was lacking,” she says. She pressed her boss to give her a hands-on job and in 2001 became marketing director of ice-cream brand Häagen-Dazs Japan, where Suntory has a 40 per cent stake, managing about 40 staff.
“They knew much more about Häagen-Dazs than me,” says Ono. The challenge called for a “servant-leader” management style that was uncommon in Japan’s top-down, male-dominated leadership culture. Instead of imposing her ideas, she “started to have some thoughts of empowering or enabling” the Häagen-Dazs team to expand the brand.
As chief executive, Ono still deploys the same approach, setting direction but delegating to expert team members where it makes sense: “I cannot do everything. Each member has their strengths and sometimes is a bit more experienced than me in one sector or area . . . What I can do is create the ideal situation, the environment for them to [achieve] 100 per cent or 150 per cent [of what they are capable of].”
Ono is uncomfortable with some of the attention generated by her elevation to chief executive. Within months of her appointment, Fortune and Forbes had named her to their lists of powerful female leaders. The Financial Times featured her in its showcase of the world’s most influential women, alongside longer-serving CEOs such as Mary Barra of General Motors. At the time, Ono had not even announced a full year of sales under her leadership and its share price trajectory in the months immediately after her appointment was, by her own admission, “not great”.
“I appreciate they [the media] selected me, but I think actually they don’t know much about me,” says Ono.
She has set herself some tough challenges already. Drawing on her prior experience running Suntory Beverage & Food’s human resources department, she wants to internationalise the group further. In particular, while non-Japanese colleagues have taken on board some of the Japanese corporate culture, she wants to tear down the “mental wall” that she says still hinders Japan-based teams from learning from international colleagues.
In Japan, assailed by weak domestic consumption, she must fight against a deflationary mindset among customers. Suntory Beverage & Food pushed through price increases ahead of the competition last year and Ono does not rule out increasing prices again, as overheads remain high. To achieve a level of sustainable growth in the Japanese business, “We need to change or we need to improve the whole profit structure,” she says.
Since she joined Suntory, the old family business where every face was familiar has grown to become a multinational, albeit one that is still family-controlled. Ono says she never imagined that non-Japanese directors would sit on the corporate board, as they do at Suntory Beverage & Food, or that its international business would become larger than its domestic operation.
But she insists there is further to go. India has its attractions, she says, despite the difficulty of breaking into that market. Ono also sees potential to do more than merely bottle for PepsiCo in the US. “Otherwise, we don’t have any footprint in the US. And it’s the biggest market. And as we have very unique brands, with heritage, we want to [take] any possibility to put our brands . . . in the US,” says Ono.
What about acquiring US beverage names? The woman who started her career by helping seal a groundbreaking takeover of a French vineyard and set her sights on becoming a globe-trotting female Japanese executive is evidently still channelling Suntory’s “don’t give up” philosophy. “That can be an option,” she replies.
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