Japan Inc gingerly embraces more foreigners
Big firms are putting non-Japanese on their boards
MICHAEL WOODFORD, the first non-Japanese president of Olympus, likened the camera-maker’s board members who sacked him in 2011 to “children in a classroom”. Mr Woodford had confronted Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, the company’s imperious chairman, over a $1.7bn hole in its finances. Mr Kikukawa responded by orchestrating a show of hands in a boardroom coup that sent the Englishman packing. It all fitted a cliché of Japan’s boardrooms as an all-Japanese, all-male club where wizened bosses ruthlessly enforce wa, or harmony.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The wa forward”
Business November 4th 2017
- A merger between CVS Health and Aetna could be what the doctor ordered
- Dark tourism spooks its way into the mainstream
- IKEA undertakes some home improvements
- Japanese cars enjoy an afterlife in Myanmar, but not for much longer
- Japan Inc gingerly embraces more foreigners
- The airline industry’s most outspoken boss goes global
- Remember corporate Europe? It wants to be noticed again
From the November 4th 2017 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Business
DeepSeek poses a challenge to Beijing as much as to Silicon Valley
The story of Liang Wenfeng, the model-maker’s mysterious founder
Nvidia is in danger of losing its monopoly-like margins
But don’t count it out yet
DeepSeek sends a shockwave through markets
A cheap Chinese language model has investors in Silicon Valley asking questions
Germans are world champions of calling in sick
It’s easy and it pays well
Knowing what your colleagues earn
The pros and cons of greater pay transparency
A $500bn investment plan says a lot about Trump’s AI priorities
It’s build, baby, build