Global Economies Theme Analysis

I looked at the faces around the table. Whenever I’d imagined this scene, I’d omitted one crucial element. I’d failed to foresee how present World War II would be in that room. The war was right there, beside us, between us, attaching a subtext to every word we spoke. Good evening, everyone—there’s good news tonight!

I was developing an unhealthy contempt for Adidas. Or maybe it was healthy. That one German company had dominated the shoe market for a couple of decades, and they possessed all the arrogance of unchallenged dominance. Of course it’s possible that they weren’t arrogant at all, that to motivate myself I needed to see them as a monster. In any event, I despised them. I was tired of looking up every day and seeing them far, far ahead. I couldn’t bear the thought that it was my fate to do so forever.

Waiting for Kitami to return, I had the strangest thought. I recalled all the times I’d volunteered with the Boy Scouts, all the times I’d sat on Eagle Scout review boards, handing out merit badges for honor and integrity. Two or three weekends a year I’d question pink-cheeked boys about their probity, their honesty, and now I was stealing documents from another man’s briefcase? I was headed down a dark path. No telling where it might lead. Wherever, there was no getting around one immediate consequence of my actions. I’d have to recuse myself from the next review board.

Three weeks passed. The company, my company, born from nothing, and now finishing 1971 with sales of $1.3 million, was on life support.

I felt like a married man caught in a tawdry love triangle. I was assuring my lover, Nissho, that it was only a matter of time before I divorced my spouse, Onitsuka. Meanwhile, I was encouraging Onitsuka to think of me as a loving and devoted husband. “I do not like this way of doing business,” I wrote Sumeragi, “but I feel it was thrust upon us by a company with the worst possible intentions.” We’ll be together soon, darling. Just have patience.

When I wasn’t with Cousin Houser, studying the case, I was being studied. In other words, deposed. For all my belief that business was war without bullets, I’d never felt the full fury of conference-room combat until I found myself at a table surrounded by five lawyers. They tried everything to get me to say I’d violated my contract with Onitsuka. They tried trick questions, hostile questions, squirrelly questions, loaded questions. When questions didn’t work, they twisted my answers. A deposition is strenuous for anyone, but for a shy person it’s an ordeal. Badgered, baited, harassed, mocked, I was a shell of myself by the end.

On one level, of course, the idea made perfect sense. Going public would generate a ton of money in a flash. But it would also be highly perilous, because going public often meant losing control. It could mean working for someone else, suddenly being answerable to stockholders, hundreds or maybe thousands of strangers, many of whom would be large investment firms.

Going public could turn us overnight into the thing we loathed, the thing we’d spent our lives running from.