Withdrawal and Restructuring are the Practice of “Reversible Management”

The Essential Decision Common to “Withdrawal” and “Restructuring”

In recent days, several seemingly unrelated corporate news stories have been reported. Delivery service Wolt announced its withdrawal from the Japanese market. Sports brand Puma, anticipating a challenging 2025, stated its intent to stage a comeback by 2027 through business restructuring. Entertainment company GENDA implemented an organizational restructuring of its North American subsidiary. Furthermore, Colere began offering “Seen,” a survey tool for measuring trust in the workplace.

These are not merely isolated corporate trends. They symbolize the “decision points” that all leaders facing drastic market changes must confront right now. And flowing beneath the surface of these stories is a single, core question of “reversible management”:

“How much room for reversal does this decision leave, should circumstances change?”

Withdrawal is neither defeat nor an end. Similarly, large-scale restructuring is not merely a gamble to break the status quo. These are practices of “reversible management decisions”—the act of reviewing once-solidified structures and reallocating resources.

Wolt’s Exit from Japan: The Decision as a “Clean End” to a Market Experiment

Wolt’s exit from Japan was reported in many media outlets using words like “defeat” or “retreat.” Certainly, ending a service is a conclusion of sorts. However, viewing this through the lens of “reversible management” reveals a completely different landscape.

Wolt’s parent company, DoorDash, is said to have decided on the Japan exit as part of a global “restructuring strategy.” This is a decision to concentrate limited management resources on more profitable or strategically important markets. The crucial point is that they did not make the decision to “commit to the Japanese market forever” an irreversible one.

A common pitfall for many SMEs is continuing with clearly unprofitable new ventures or market entries due to reasons like “we’ve invested this much already” or “we’ve already started.” This solidifies the initial decision as a fixed “conclusion,” trapping themselves in a point of no return.

In reversible management, new market entries or ventures are designed as “market experiments.” In doing so, an “evaluation period” and “clear exit criteria (KGIs)” are always set in advance—for example, “if profitability is not achieved within three years” or “if market share cannot exceed X%.” Wolt’s decision can likely be interpreted as a planned “end of experiment” based on such pre-defined scenarios. This judgment preserves resources for other markets and leaves open the possibility of “returning” for a different opportunity in the future.

Puma’s Business Restructuring: “Redesigning the Structure” with Struggle as a Premise

On the other hand, Puma’s case demonstrates the “redesign” of an existing, large business structure itself. Reports indicate they foresee a challenging 2025, will undertake restructuring in response, and aim for a comeback by 2027. This is highly instructive because they are abandoning the illusion that current success patterns will last forever and are proactively taking action now, premised on a future of “struggle.”

Many managers fear making changes to a structure while the current business is doing well, thinking “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, the environment is constantly changing. Competitors emerge, technology innovates, and customer preferences shift. Puma’s approach is a prime example of converting the sense of crisis that “it will be too late once the struggle becomes apparent” into energy for structural reform ahead of time.

This “restructuring anticipating struggle” directly connects to the reversible management principle of “designing with failure in mind.” If an organization or business portfolio is solidified on the premise that everything will go smoothly, once the environment changes, the rigidified structure becomes a shackle, making it impossible to make a major course correction. By boldly declaring “2025 will be a struggle,” Puma clearly communicated the necessity and timeline for transformation to shareholders and employees. This is the very process of “building consensus” for change, an act that increases reversibility (= reducing resistance) to smoothly execute the decision to transform.

GENDA’s Organizational Integration: Building a “Common Foundation” to Enhance Reversibility

The organizational restructuring of GENDA’s North American subsidiary provides another important perspective. They are consolidating multiple subsidiaries under “GENDA Americas” and centralizing corporate functions common to group companies. This is the work of intentionally redesigning a “fragmented structure” that naturally emerged during growth into an “integrated structure.”

At first glance, this might seem like “solidification.” However, in SME management, a state where each department or business unit operates with its own rules, tools, and management methods—essentially “doing its own thing”—actually creates the most dangerous state of being “unable to reverse.” Information is scattered, grasping reality becomes difficult, and even if individual decisions deviate significantly from overall optimization, there is no “common handle” to correct them.

What GENDA is doing is installing this “common handle.” By centralizing corporate functions and enabling oversight of North American operations from a unified perspective, the organization gains “reversibility for course correction” before decisions made by individual business units stray too far from the group’s overall strategy. Integration is not about reducing freedom; it is an act of reclaiming the “strategic room for reversal” lost through disorderly fragmentation.

The “Trust Measurement” Tool Reveals the “Grasping of Reality” Underpinning Decisions

And the emergence of workplace trust measurement tools like Colere’s “Seen” reminds us of the most fundamental and crucial process supporting these major management decisions: “grasping reality.”

Many irreversible decisions are made based not on data or reality, but solely on a manager’s intuition, assumptions, or the loud opinions of a few. Should we continue the business or withdraw? Should we transform the organization or maintain the status quo? The more ambiguous the basis for that decision, the more psychologically difficult it becomes to change course once set. Because one cannot explain, “Why did we make that initial decision?”

Tools like “Seen” make intangible assets like workplace trust “visible” and foster dialogue about organizational transformation. This is the practice of the reversible management principle: “prioritize observation over solidification.” If the state of the organization can be “observed” quantitatively and qualitatively, a shared recognition that “the current path is problematic” emerges, reducing resistance to change. Furthermore, because “whether conditions improved after the change” can also be measured, the decision to transform itself becomes an “experiment,” allowing for further course correction (a return) if the effects are lacking.

For SME leaders, even without introducing expensive tools, developing a habit of “observing organizational reality” through regular anonymous surveys, setting up open dialogue sessions with management, and monitoring basic metrics like turnover rates and project success rates forms the foundation for all reversible decisions.

Summary: Withdrawal and Restructuring are Proof of Management “Resilience”

Wolt’s exit, Puma’s restructuring, GENDA’s integration. All of these are attempts to flexibly reconfigure one’s own management structure in response to a changing environment. It is simplistic to view them solely as manifestations of “failure” or “hardship.” Rather, they should be seen as manifestations of “resilience”—the ability to abandon the rigid mindset of “forever adhering to what was once decided” and reallocate resources according to the situation.

Fellow SME leaders, please reflect on your own company’s major management decisions.

• Does that new venture have a clear “evaluation period” and “exit conditions” set?
• For your currently successful business, have you conducted scenario analysis premised on “what if the environment changes”?
• Are the various departments in your organization connected by a “common handle” that allows you to grasp reality?
• Before important decisions, do you always gather “observable facts”?

The goal of reversible management is not to make perfect decisions every time. That is impossible. The goal is to equip your company with a structure that allows you, even if a decision proves wrong or the environment changes drastically, to rebuild the system, reallocate resources, and “return” to a new direction before suffering fatal damage.

The protagonists in these recent news stories, regardless of their scale, are challenging themselves to practice this. May your next decision not trap your future self in a place of “no return,” but rather be one that inherently contains the possibility of always making a “fresh start.”