TOKYO >> Junro Ito flew to California this year on a mission: The billionaire executive at Seven & i Holdings, the Japanese parent company of 7-Eleven, felt the company had lost its way. He wanted to revive the culture fostered by his father, the company’s founder.

Ito wanted to establish training workshops for Seven & i employees and was seeking advice from experts at Claremont Graduate University, where management guru Peter Drucker, a close friend and adviser to his father, had taught for decades.

The workshops would instill in executives and others at Seven & i the philosophy espoused by Drucker — that the purpose of a company is to serve its customers, not to maximize profits for shareholders.

Back in Tokyo, the company started hosting the monthly management workshops just as Ito, a vice president at Seven & i, began plotting a multibillion-dollar takeover. His family owns a minority stake in Seven & i, and he wanted to keep it from being acquired by a foreign rival.

Seven & i has more than 85,000 stores, and 7-Eleven is a cornerstone of Japanese society. People who know Ito, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said his fixation on Drucker offered a window into his plan.

The battle for control of 7-Eleven is emblematic of changes underway in Japan. For more than a decade, officials have pushed Japanese companies to take steps — such as giving proper consideration to takeover offers — to show they are open to actions that would create more value for shareholders.

In essence, Japan’s policymakers are pushing for companies to focus less on Drucker and more on Milton Friedman, the economist who said the purpose of business was to generate profits for shareholders.

Companies have started to respond: buying their own shares to boost stock prices, engaging with activist investors and bringing independent shareholder advocates onto boards. Warren Buffett and other foreign investors have piled into Japanese stocks, helping to lift them to their highest values ever.

Seven & i’s shares are among those near record highs, especially since August, when it received an unsolicited bid worth $38 billion from Canadian retail group Alimentation Couche-Tard, owner of the Circle K convenience store chain. After Seven & i rejected the takeover proposal in September, Couche-Tard returned the next month with a $47 billion offer.

As Seven & i considered that offer, Ito submitted his own bid in November of more than $50 billion to take full control of the company. If successful, Ito’s deal would be one of the largest leveraged buyouts ever.

Unlike Couche-Tard, which has promoted its offer in many media appearances, Ito has stayed silent about the details and motivations behind his bid. Seven & i confirmed only that it had received a confidential proposal from Ito, and declined to make him available for an interview.

In Japan, founding family members like Seven & i’s Ito tend to champion relationships with customers and communities, long-term stability and corporate culture, said Yasuhiro Ochiai, a University of Shizuoka professor who is a leading researcher of family businesses and management in Japan.

These founding family members hold sway — either through direct ownership or as managers — in about half of all public companies in Japan and often embody “an older, unique style of Japanese capitalism that does not always prioritize shareholder returns and profit generation,” Ochiai said.

Japan has long been regarded as impenetrable for foreign companies seeking mergers and acquisitions.

Couche-Tard is aware of this, because it tried to acquire 7-Eleven before. It approached Masatoshi Ito, Junro Ito’s father and the founder of the company that eventually became Seven & i, about a potential deal in 2005. It was swiftly dismissed.