A Different Kind of CEO Story
We talk a lot about leadership. It fills business books, LinkedIn posts, keynote stages. Words like vision, strategy, alignment, and culture get recycled endlessly. Yet when organisations face genuine crisis — the kind where livelihoods are at stake and trust has completely eroded — most executives retreat behind glass walls, PR statements, and carefully managed messaging.
And then there are leaders like Haruka Nishimatsu.
In 2006, Nishimatsu became President and CEO of Japan Airlines (JAL) — a proud national carrier that was quietly drowning. Decades of over-expansion, government dependency, bloated costs, and an entrenched bureaucratic culture had hollowed out the airline from the inside. JAL was technically flying, but it was flying on borrowed time.
By the late 2000s, JAL carried over ¥2.3 trillion ($25 billion) in liabilities, operated unprofitable routes under political pressure, and maintained pension obligations it could no longer sustain. Despite being a symbol of national pride, the airline was on a collision course with bankruptcy.
What made Nishimatsu remarkable was not that he rescued JAL — the actual financial turnaround came after bankruptcy, under the guidance of Kazuo Inamori. What made Nishimatsu extraordinary was how he showed up during the hardest stretch, before the storm fully broke — and what that meant to the 47,000 people watching him.
The CEO Who Earned Less Than His Pilots
In corporate Japan — a culture of hierarchy, formality, and carefully observed seniority — the gap between a CEO and frontline staff is not just financial. It is cultural, spatial, and symbolic. Executives have designated floors, designated parking spaces, company cars with drivers, and executive dining rooms with separate menus.
Nishimatsu eliminated all of it.
What Nishimatsu Actually Did
- Cut his own salary to approximately ¥10 million per year — lower than many of JAL's senior pilots and experienced cabin crew
- Gave up his company car and driver — he commuted by public bus and train like every other employee
- Ate in the employee cafeteria — not in a private dining room, not at external restaurants, but at the same table, eating the same food
- Wore no visible symbols of status — no reserved parking, no administrative buffer keeping employees away from him
- Held open conversations with staff — sought direct feedback rather than managing through hierarchy
These were not PR gestures. Nishimatsu maintained these habits consistently, year after year, through periods of severe cost-cutting and restructuring. While thousands of employees were being asked to accept wage reductions, reduced benefits, and in many cases, redundancy — their CEO was already living below the level he was asking them to accept.
There is a fundamental difference between a CEO who announces cost cuts from a boardroom and a CEO who has already made the deepest cut — to themselves. Nishimatsu understood that before you ask others to sacrifice, you must be willing to be the first to do so. Not symbolically. Actually.
What the Cafeteria Meant
The image of Haruka Nishimatsu sitting in the JAL employee cafeteria, tray in hand, eating with ground crew and check-in staff, became one of the most discussed images in Japanese business circles. It sounds small. It was not.
In large organisations, especially ones under stress, the biggest source of disengagement is not pay. It is the feeling of invisibility. The sense that the people at the top have no idea what it is actually like to work here. That decisions are made by people who have never stood at your station, never dealt with your constraints, never felt the anxiety you carry every morning.
When a CEO sits in the same cafeteria, he makes himself visible and the organisation makes itself whole again. He signals: I am not separate from this. I am part of it.
| The Typical Executive Approach | Nishimatsu's Approach | Signal Sent to Organisation |
|---|---|---|
| Announce pay cuts for staff | Cut own salary first — deepest | I am not asking you to do something I won't |
| Company car, executive parking | Public bus and train, daily | My time is not worth more than yours |
| Executive dining room | Employee cafeteria, same food | I see you. I am not above you. |
| Managed, filtered communications | Direct conversations with all levels | I want to hear what is actually true |
| Shield leadership from the pain | Leadership absorbs the pain first | We are in this together |
Leading Through Impossible Choices
Nishimatsu's tenure coincided with one of the most painful periods in JAL's history. Routes were being cut. Thousands of roles were being eliminated. Pension benefits that employees had counted on for decades were being renegotiated downward. For a workforce that had grown up in the Japanese tradition of lifetime employment — where loyalty to a company was as deep as family loyalty — these were not just economic changes. They were identity-level ruptures.
In this environment, leadership cannot be delegated to communication teams. It cannot be managed through memos. It has to be present.
In Japanese organisational philosophy, ba refers to the physical and psychological space where knowledge, trust, and connection are formed. When a leader inhabits the same ba as the people they lead — the same cafeteria, the same bus, the same anxious morning — they are not just being humble. They are doing something profound: they are making the crisis a shared experience rather than an imposed one.
Nishimatsu was not popular with everyone. Some board members and stakeholders felt his approach was theatrical or insufficiently decisive for the scale of restructuring required. There were genuine strategic failures during his tenure that contributed to JAL eventually filing for bankruptcy in January 2010. He resigned as part of that process.
But here is the question worth sitting with: When the bankruptcy came, were JAL's employees more or less willing to fight for the company's survival? When Kazuo Inamori arrived to lead the turnaround, did he inherit a broken, resentful workforce — or one that still believed in the mission, even through the hardest moment?
JAL was relisted on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in September 2012 — just two and a half years after bankruptcy, far ahead of schedule. By 2013, it was posting record profits. The speed of that recovery had many causes. One of them was a workforce that had not given up.
The Contrast: What Most Organisations Do Instead
When companies face crisis, the instinct at the top is almost always to protect the top. It happens in every industry. Executive pay packages remain intact while "restructuring programmes" eliminate frontline roles. Town halls are replaced with carefully drafted internal memos. Leaders become less visible precisely when presence is most needed.
The Visibility Paradox
The higher the seniority, the more insulated leaders become from the realities of the organisation. The people who most need to understand what is happening are the furthest from it.
Sacrifice as Signal
When leadership asks others to sacrifice but does not visibly share in that sacrifice, trust erodes. Not loudly — quietly. People stop believing the mission is real.
Proximity Builds Truth
Leaders who stay close to their people receive unfiltered information. Leaders who stay distant receive the version of reality that has passed through every layer of hierarchy — which is rarely the real one.
Symbol Over Statement
A single consistent daily action — taking the bus, eating in the cafeteria — communicates more than a hundred leadership speeches. Actions are not supplementary to culture. They are the culture.
Lessons for Modern Engineering Leaders
You may not lead an airline with 47,000 employees. But if you lead an engineering team — even a team of five — the principles Nishimatsu embodied are directly transferable.
Engineering leadership has its own version of the executive dining room. It looks like:
- Managers who never look at production logs or run commands themselves
- Tech leads who assign the tedious on-call rotations but are never on the rota
- Engineering directors who announce "developer experience improvements" without knowing the current state of the developer experience
- Leaders who declare a culture of psychological safety but respond poorly when someone actually says something uncomfortable
What Example-Led Leadership Looks Like in Engineering
- Take on-call shifts yourself — Know what wakes your team up at 3am. Feel it.
- Sit in the same retros and reviews without dominating them — Listen more than you speak.
- Admit publicly when you were wrong or didn't know — Psychological safety is modelled, not declared.
- Protect your team's time before your own — When capacity is constrained, absorb the pressure upward, not downward.
- Stay close to the work — Read PRs, understand the current pain, ask about blockers in ways that make it safe to answer honestly.
- Make sacrifices visible — When hard trade-offs happen, show your reasoning and what you personally gave up to reach that decision.
The Renewed Connection — And What That Actually Means
When we say Nishimatsu steered JAL toward a renewed connection with its people, we don't mean he ran engagement surveys or launched a values programme. We mean that the people working at JAL — the ground crews, the cabin staff, the check-in agents who dealt with frustrated passengers during cancellations and delays — felt that their CEO understood them as human beings, not headcount.
That is an extraordinarily rare thing. And it cannot be manufactured. It can only be lived.
Trust in organisations is built slowly and destroyed quickly. It is not built through programmes, frameworks, or values statements on walls. It is built through repeated, observable behaviour over time. Every time a leader acts consistently with what they claim to believe — every single day, in small choices — they make a deposit. Nishimatsu made that deposit daily. In the cafeteria. On the bus. In every salary review where he took less so others would lose less.
When an organisation has that kind of trust stored up — earned over years of consistent behaviour — it can survive almost anything. When it doesn't have it, even good times feel precarious.
A Renewed Sense of Purpose
JAL's identity had always been tied to Japan's post-war economic resurgence. The red crane on the tail fin was not just a logo — it was a national symbol. But symbols hollow out when the reality inside the organisation doesn't match what the symbol promises.
Nishimatsu understood that the airline's purpose could not be restored by a rebranding exercise or a strategy deck. It could only be restored by making the inside of the organisation feel like the values it claimed to hold. An airline that says it values its people has to be led by someone who visibly, undeniably values them.
Purpose is not a statement. Purpose is what the organisation actually does when the situation is hard and no one is watching the PR narrative.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ARE YOU LEADING BY EXAMPLE? │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ │
│ □ SHARED SACRIFICE │
│ → When cuts happen, do you take the first and deepest one? │
│ → Do your team members know what you personally gave up? │
│ → Is your compensation proportional to what you ask others │
│ to accept? │
│ │
│ □ PROXIMITY │
│ → When did you last do the work your team does daily? │
│ → Do people feel safe telling you what is actually wrong? │
│ → Are you reachable, or filtered through layers? │
│ │
│ □ VISIBLE CONSISTENCY │
│ → Does your daily behaviour match your stated values? │
│ → Would your team describe your leadership the same way │
│ you would describe it? │
│ → Are you more visible in good times than hard ones? │
│ │
│ □ MISSION CREDIBILITY │
│ → Do people believe the mission because they see you │
│ living it? │
│ → Or do they suspect the mission is for external audiences │
│ only? │
│ │
│ □ THE CAFETERIA TEST │
│ → Would your team be surprised to see you in the cafeteria? │
│ → If yes — that gap is the work. │
│ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘Conclusion: Leadership Is Not a Title You Hold. It Is a Standard You Live.
Haruka Nishimatsu did not save Japan Airlines on his own. The financial restructuring required outside intervention, regulatory support, and the extraordinary second-act leadership of Kazuo Inamori. Nishimatsu made mistakes. Real ones, with real consequences.
But what Nishimatsu gave JAL in its darkest years was something that cannot be outsourced, restructured, or bought: he gave them a leader who showed up. Someone who did not use his position as a shield against the pain his organisation was in. Someone who made his choices legible to 47,000 people every single day, not through speeches, but through actions so consistent and so visible that no one could mistake them for performance.
That is not a Japanese thing. It is not a corporate turnaround thing. It is a human thing.
People follow leaders who are willing to go first into the difficult places. They go to the wall for organisations that feel real, not managed. They rebuild, recommit, and surprise you with their loyalty — but only if they believe you mean it.
There will always be a new leadership model, a new management methodology, a new organisational design theory. But underneath all of it, the question people are always asking their leaders is the same one they asked Nishimatsu: Are you in this with us? Or are you just managing us through it? How you answer that question — not in words, but in choices — determines everything that follows.
The bus Nishimatsu took to work was not just a commute. It was the answer.
Building a team culture where leadership and trust are more than words? Let's talk about what that looks like in practice.