Latest / Boardroom Conversations with Fexingo: CEOs, Strategy, and Corporate Leadership Explained / How Nintendo's Board Kept the Magic in Gaming
Transcript
- Lucas: So this is episode one hundred and fifty of Boardroom Conversations, and I wanted to do something a little different. We've spent a lot of time on boards that had to pivot or defend against activists. Today, let's talk about a board that mostly said no to all of that — Nintendo's. Luna: Nintendo is fascinating because they're not a tech company. They're not even really a gaming company in the traditional sense. They're a toy company that happens to make video games. Lucas: Exactly. And their board has governed with that identity for decades. You look at the Wii U failure, and most boards would have fired the CEO and pivoted to mobile or something. Nintendo's board basically said, 'We'll take the hit, we'll try again, but we're not going to change the core of what we do.' Luna: That's a really unusual level of patience. I mean, the Wii U lost them billions. How did the board justify sticking with the strategy? Lucas: Well, part of it is that the board is stacked with people who came from the product side. You've got Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, who's been on the board for over twenty years. And the current president, Shuntaro Furukawa, came up through the accounting side, but he's said in interviews that he sees himself as a 'custodian' of Nintendo's philosophy, not a typical corporate executive. Luna: Custodian is a good word. It's almost like they view themselves as protecting a legacy, not just maximizing shareholder value. Lucas: And that legacy has a very specific history. Go back to the nineteen eighties: Nintendo was a playing-card company. They made Hanafuda cards. When they entered video games, they could have chased the latest trends in the arcade market, but they built a platform around first-party software quality. The board institutionalized that.