TURNAROUND Schick Japan The Proven Recipe for Corporate Transformation by Hideo Goto

"Maintaining the status quo is to accept eventual decline.”

How did Schick Japan achieve a dramatic corporate turnaround in just two years, rather than resting on its laurels as the undisputed champion of its field?

Schick Japan holds the number one share of the domestic wet shaving market with its razors and shaving agents, and for three decades, it has led that market with around half of it. Yet the market is shrinking along with Japan's population, and demand for shaving floundered for a time because of COVID-19. Even while keeping the biggest slice of the market, the company's performance had seemingly plateaued.

Recognizing the crisis this represented, the company invited the author of this book, who had previously achieved turnarounds at several foreign-affiliated beauty companies, to serve as its representative director and revive growth. Pressing forward with everything from product development to a structural transformation of marketing and distribution channels, he harnessed the strengths of the Schick brand to expand into the beauty category of skincare and hair removal and to cultivate the new target markets of women and young people. In just two years, the company became a beauty grooming company providing not just wet shaving products but total grooming solutions, and in fiscal year 2024, it posted substantially higher sales and profit year over year.

This book lays out the author's recipe for a corporate turnaround: his approach to each process along the way, from redefining the company's raison d'etre (purpose), formulating and instilling what it should aspire to become (vision), and drafting a strategy to rebuilding a simpler organization that decides faster. It also outlines what was done to change employees' mindset and behaviors and make them a driving force for the turnaround.

Written for every executive contemplating a turnaround of their own company, this book is full of advice on how to pull one off successfully.