A lawyer with no business training was pulled from his Tokyo role and offered the CEO job at Bridgestone Americas, a $10 billion company with 55,000 employees. He had never run anything before. The offer came right after he presented to the global board.
I was summoned to Japan. The parent company is headquartered in Tokyo. And I was asked to give a presentation to the global board. And after it was over, I was told the CEO, the global CEO, the boss of my boss, who was the CEO of Bridgestone Americas, the boss of my boss wanted to see me. And he said that my boss, the CEO of Bridgestone Americas, would be retiring at the end of the year and they wanted me to be the CEO. And that was pretty shocking.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially, and you talk about you'd never even taken a business course before. You know, you're chief counsel for this huge corporation and now you're— now what? Right.
Right. Yeah. I'd never run a business. I don't even know. I don't even remember running a lemonade stand. Here I was about to be the CEO of a $10 billion company, 55,000 employees operating on 5 continents. So it was pretty intimidating.
