"Satoru Iwata: Hubris versus Western Culture"

[Asriel]

Some interesting points, but I think laying the blame--and any praise--entirely on Iwata misses the point.

Yes, he's the President, but he's also one part of a board of directors who chart the overall course of the company. Iwata doesn't make decisions or chart the strategy by himself, even if he is the most prominent face of Nintendo's corporate decision making. I'd say he's good for Nintendo while being part of the problem, but I think that without someone as simultaneously humble and as decisive as Iwata, Nintendo would be in worse shape.

There's no doubt many of Nintendo's policies--particularly online and with digital distribution--have been backward looking, but how much of this is down to Iwata? How much of the change in direction at Nintendo has been engineered by Iwata? The question that we should really ask, and that can't be answered, is how much of Nintendo's current direction is down to the rest of the board?

What has Iwata really done, and spoken about as his personal missions? Iwata has gradually increased Nintendo's development capacity. One of his first acts as President was to restructure Nintendo's long standing internal arrangement. This year he's set to massively restructure the way Nintendo's R&D divisions operate. Iwata pushed ideas like Wi-Fi Connection, Virtual Console, Wii Connect 24 and Miiverse at major trade shows and conferences as vital to the future of Nintendo. He seems to me to be more forward looking than many people give him credit, and I have to wonder, and I partially suspect, that the rest of Nintendo's board became jittery as the phenomenal growth of the Wii/DS ground down, and they demanded another change of direction. There have been plenty of voices shouting to drown out Iwata's own message over the years, and it seems many of Nintendo's investors listened to the message. What's to say some board members haven't had the same doubts? What's to say they didn't have their own doubts about the direction of the company, the wisdom and the long-term stability of the Wii/DS approach? Perhaps Nintendo's paradoxical ability to remain stuck in the past isn't down to a flippant, backwards peddling Iwata, but to a board afraid to take more risks with their company. After all, Nintendo is not a corporate dictatorship--there's a board of directors making decisions and tinkering with strategy, while Iwata remains the public face of this corporate side.

The truth is, Iwata has made serious mistakes--but has also guided Nintendo to their best ever position in the videogames industry. He has taken the fall publicly and financially for the failings of 3DS, and acted in the long-term interests of the company when many other people in his position would bow to investor pressure and have either abandoned hardware after the GameCube era or moved into smartphone development rather than placing faith in the long term future of dedicated hardware. It's very, very easy right now to throw darts at a man at the helm of a company facing serious challenges. It's easy--with hindsight--to diminish the accomplishments of Nintendo during this era and to accentuate their failings under Iwata's stewardship. But it misses the point. Nintendo is not a one man show and the blame and praise of the last decade rests on the entire board and management at Nintendo. They all need to change.

Jettisoning Iwata might seem like a good idea to keyboard warriors who assume Iwata is single handedly responsible for the direction of a company with a board of directors, but it's not going to solve anything. Iwata has already as good as said (in Japanese corporate speak) he will step down if the current plan does not follow through as he wants it to. Keyboard warriors may yet get their head on a pike and feel justified.

However, I feel those are the actions and words of a CEO you want to keep hold of--someone at the top not afraid to take drastic action, someone not afraid to confront their mistakes, not afraid to take personal responsibility for failures. We don't know what the boardroom politics are at Nintendo, but given the turbulence, failings and enormous success of the last decade, I'd say the problem isn't just Iwata. Hell, perhaps we should pause and consider the possibility it might not even be Iwata at all.