By David Hutchins
Where did they all go?
Recently I looked back at a slide I have used for years: a list of the UK and European companies where my consultancy ran Total Quality programmes in the 1980s. Brintons Carpets, Marks & Spencer, Wedgwood, Chloride, Ideal Standard, Tioxide, Heinz, ICL, Rowntree Mackintosh, Lucas, Metal Box, Castrol, Short Brothers, VSEL and many more. Good companies, many of them household names, and most of them full of people who wanted to do things well.
I asked a simple question: what became of them?
The answer shocked even me. Of the 32 UK clients I could trace, only three are still recognisably the same company under the same ownership: Marks & Spencer, Shell and Cabot Carbon, and Cabot was American-owned all along. The other 29, about nine in ten, have been taken over, broken up, sold on, or closed. Several have changed hands four or five times.
In almost every case, the improvement work we started together did not survive the change.
Four stories
Brintons Carpets. Founded in Kidderminster in 1783 and owned by the Brinton family for over two centuries. In 2011 it went into administration and was bought by the US private equity firm Carlyle, which sold it on to another investment firm, Argand Partners, in 2017.
Wedgwood. One of the great names of British industry. It merged with Waterford in 1986, collapsed into administration in 2009, was rescued by a US private equity firm, and was sold in 2015 to the Finnish group Fiskars. Most everyday production now happens overseas.
Short Brothers. I was technical advisor to the turnaround at Shorts in Belfast, filmed for the BBC Select series. Since then it has had three owners: Bombardier of Canada from 1989, Spirit AeroSystems of the USA from 2020, and since December 2025 Boeing, with Airbus taking over part of the site.
Tioxide. Owned by ICI when we worked there, then sold to the American firm Huntsman in 1999 and later spun off as Venator. Venator went into administration in October 2025, and the Greatham plant was sold in April 2026 to a Chinese company.
Each owner had its own plans, its own timescale and its own priorities. None of them could be expected to share the purpose of the people who started the improvement journey.
Deming saw it coming
The very first of Dr W. Edwards Deming’s fourteen points was this: create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to stay in business and provide jobs.
He also listed what he called the “deadly diseases” of Western management. Three of them describe my client list almost exactly:
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Mobility of top management
A change of ownership is all three at once. New owners bring new targets and a new timescale, often three to five years before the next sale. New chief executives arrive with their own initiatives and quietly drop the old ones. Improvement that takes a decade to mature never gets its decade.
Quality improvement is cumulative. Each year’s gains are built on the habits, skills and trust of the years before. Break the chain and you do not simply pause; you go back to the beginning.
Meanwhile, in Japan
I then made a second list: twenty Japanese companies I have known well over the same years, many of them through study missions. Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Ricoh, Canon, Sony, JVC, Panasonic (Matsushita Electric), Komatsu, Daikin, Aisin, Yuasa, Fujifilm, Calsonic, Asmo, Nippon Steel, Kobe Steel, Toshiba, Yamazaki Mazak and Kose.
| Still the same company | Merged with another home company | Taken over or rescued | |
|---|---|---|---|
| My UK clients (32) | 3 | – | 29 |
| Japanese companies (20) | 13 | 4 | 3 |
Thirteen are the same company they were forty years ago, under the same name, often still guided by the founding family or its successors. Four more merged with fellow Japanese firms, such as JVC with Kenwood and Yuasa with Japan Storage Battery, and kept their purpose. Only three were rescued or taken over.
Nine in ten of my British clients lost their independence. Three in twenty Japanese companies did.
The exceptions prove the rule
The three Japanese companies that did lose their way are instructive.
Nissan nearly collapsed in 1999 and was rescued by Renault, which took a controlling stake. Under Carlos Ghosn it adopted Western-style cost-cutting at speed, including breaking up its long-standing family of suppliers. Renault has since reduced its stake, but Nissan has struggled with heavy losses and plant closures.
Calsonic shows where that road leads. It had been part of Nissan’s supplier family since 1954. Nissan sold it to the US private equity firm KKR in 2017; it was merged with Magneti Marelli, loaded with debt, and filed for bankruptcy protection in the USA in June 2025. A supplier with sixty years of partnership behind it, destroyed in eight.
Toshiba suffered an accounting scandal in 2015, driven by pressure to hit short-term profit targets, followed by huge losses on its American nuclear business. In December 2023 it was taken private and left the stock market after 74 years.
In each case, the trouble began when Japanese companies started behaving like Western ones.
Why the difference?
Japanese companies were built to last. Shares were held for the long term by banks, suppliers and partner companies, so hostile takeovers were almost unknown. Banks lent patiently. Managers expected to spend their whole career in one company, so they planned for the next generation, not the next sale. Total Quality, Quality Circles and Hoshin Kanri were given decades to take root, and they did.
British companies, by contrast, were valued by the stock market quarter by quarter. A dip in profits invited a takeover bid, and every new owner brought a new plan.
I should be fair. British manufacturing shrank for many reasons over these years, and not every takeover was a failure. But short-termism made a hard situation much worse, and it made sustained improvement almost impossible.
The same pattern may hold elsewhere in Asia. India’s great family groups, such as Tata, Godrej and Mahindra, have kept their purpose for generations. China’s case is different, since most of its private companies are young and its giants are largely state-owned. Both would repay closer study.
What a Board can do now
Most British boards cannot choose their shareholders. But they can make their improvement work far harder to abandon.
- Write the purpose down. A clear, long-term statement of what the company is for, owned by the whole Board, not by one chief executive.
- Build improvement into the business plan. Through Hoshin Kanri, improvement becomes part of how the company is run, not a project that a new owner can cancel.
- Grow the skills inside. Train your own people to lead improvement, so the knowledge belongs to the company and does not walk out with a consultant or a departing director.
- Measure the culture, not just the profit. A regular, honest measure of how improvement is taking root shows any new owner what they would be throwing away.
Deming’s first point was written for exactly this world. Constancy of purpose is not old-fashioned. It is the one thing a company cannot buy, and the easiest thing for it to lose.
David Hutchins
The Kaizen Collection, developed by David Hutchins International, helps Boards do exactly this, using their own people. Find out more at hutchins.co.uk.
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