How Olympus nearly collapsed | Inside The Storm | Full episode

Olympus an Asian brand revered around the globe the company took the world of photography by storm in the early 1970s with a camera of uncompromising quality this is all over nineteen seventies film cameras these are one of the aesthetic I love in 1972 a legend was born the Olympus om one was half the weight of rival cameras without sacrificing any professional features it would be years before the rest of the pack caught up but then Olympus was hit by a corporate scandal that rocked the business world at the time I thought it was ridiculous I don't believe it was thirteen years of covering up bad corporate practices from a company that everyone admired this is the story of how one of Asia's greatest companies rose from the ashes of one of the industry's worst corporate scandals he was going to get to the bottom of what had happened and Olympus whose management did not want that deft [Music] [Music] based in Shinjuku Tokyo Olympus has made a name for itself as a global player in the world of photography it also diversified into high-tech medical equipment establishing itself as one of the leading manufacturers of endoscopy equipment and Valerie Olson professor of business strategy uses Olympus as a case study for her students Olympus was always known for high quality products it actually started in 1919 in Tokyo making microscopes and so naturally moved on to medical technology devices and then with time it started making lenses because it was making lenses for the microscopes anyway and from there it went into the camera business and into digital photography in 1936 they introduced their first camera the semi olympus won the people think of olympus as a camera company but it's it's it's really one of the it's probably the best medical equipment franchise in the world i mean it really is it's this was it's like the google of her of the endoscope business we put Daniel with Japan's economic boom in the 1970s Olympus strengthened its production base that expanded internationally with three core products microscopes cameras and medical devices but you can't take a bad Viktor Cheryl neither can you with Olympus om ten so Olympus had a very good reputation in terms of culture it was very Japanese but kakuka whether CEO actually applied a Western management style to the company and was rewarded for that he was a very charismatic person very well-liked and so the the company invested heavily in innovation a lot more than that a lot of the other Japanese companies at the time what we mean when we say Japanese culture is that we refer more to collectivist cultures as is the case in a lot of Asian countries so there's a great sense of loyalty towards one's employer its cultures it can be quite a hierarchical where one does not question authority and where one goes with what the boss says so very loyal very very strong bonded cultures Kiku Kara joined Olympus in 1964 and rose through the ranks to become president in 2001 he was well respected by his peers and was instrumental in pushing Olympus forward in the digital era and in 2011 he hired their first foreign president and chief operating officer Michael Woodford Watford had already made a name for himself by growing Olympus's international medical business significantly Kiku Cowell was confident that he could do likewise at their Tokyo headquarters I turned up in the monolith building with the headquarters of Olympus in Shinjuku and I was taken in to see giving power it was a very charming man he talked to me about you know my family and he knew them all by name and then he said he'd been running the company for ten years he didn't think he'd changed it enough and felt you know I could do what was necessary then would I take the job and we didn't discuss terms or anything I just said yes in his thirty years at Olympus Woodford's impact quickly earned him a position heading the company's European business there he successfully overhauled the European operations are made it profitable Kiku Cowell was impressed with his accomplishments and trusted him Kikukawa and the rest of the board were very happy to appoint him said that Woodford had exceeded all expectations and that he would make a great CEO and this is CEO of the medical technology devices so medical devices not even all over Olympus it was global head hiring a foreigner as president and CEO is unusual in the Japanese corporate environment in most businesses the practice is to hire employees fresh out of university who then work their way up the ladder and of course it takes a long time to become a board member of a company if he looked back 3040 years ago basically no fallenness were hired by Japanese companies right but from the start there were signs that the new appointments might not be all that it seemed woodford soon realized that he did not have the power to make fundamental decisions as Kiku kaua created the position of CEO for himself when I was offered the job and became president that's what I thought I was becoming but Kiku Carson had other ideas the president formally would have been the CEO but he made himself chairman and CEO which I came to realize meant that he controlled the board you know I quickly saw that he controlled all the levers and the board were literally puppets and he was the puppet master there was there was no ifs or bats it's whatever keeper car said was the course to be followed in 2011 less than four months after being appointed president Woodford stumbles on a long buried secret about Olympus made public in a local magazine I was in Hamburg chairing the European board meeting and in a break I received an email from a friend of mine he said Michael you need to know this magazine factor has made these extraordinary revelations about Olympus it had this article suggesting that some of the acquisitions that element this made were there was something wrong with them they had paid too much money for two people whose identities could not be really ascertained so what was the purpose of these deals was what it was asking Woodford contacted his close friend Waku Miller his translator for corporate relations with the Japanese media and showed him the shocking allegations to be perfectly honest with you and this is something that I will be ashamed of to the grave the tone of the magazine is very forceful it's very sensational and the tone put me off I mean the tone of the article made me not want to believe it I should have put up a bigger red flag for me than it did Michael was very concerned about the amount of debt that they had incurred and I should have paid more attention to that Woodford was eager to get at the bottom of the controversial charges and the only way was to speak directly to his boss Kiku cower and I found my secretary Michiko and said Michiko cani cani seeking power please it's very important and then Michiko Michiko phones back and says Michael flat as a pancake Kiku Carson is very very busy today secretary tells me but as you're so insistent and adds emphasis to the were consistent and he will see you today at lunchtime this was the first time that word for realize the limits on his authority inside Olympus when he started asking questions and and he was getting stonewalled it was a real shock for him to realize that you know he was he was shackled in this way Woodford was able to get Kiku cour and vice-president Hisashi Mori to meet him in person I can remember that lunch meeting the first time was to challenge and confront Kikukawa vividly like it was yesterday and then I walked him and there was a large boardroom table and right in the center was Kim Carson the chairman and Morrison who in effect managed all the financial transactions of the company Kiku cower and Mori sat dead center of a long table where I was thus it was a churner sandwich and if you're not Japanese you may not understand the significance and everyone knew he loved sushi but this tuna sandwich it was still wrapped up in Japan you would never leave the cling film on it there was no salad or crisps around it it was just a you know if that would you just would never do that in Japan and I understood and I was thrown that you know and disorientated me that the message for me and many of the messages in Japan is nonverbal communication Kiba Kawa was a luxury sushi platter at Olympus and I was the monkey tuna sandwich and I shouldn't forget it for Woodford the message was clear without uttering a single word Kiku Cara had made it clear that as a foreigner Woodford had no business interfering in Olympus's most sensitive affairs and smiling away he said Michael Michael you're too busy to worry about these domestic issues as the president of Olympus Woodford knew it was his responsibility to sign off the accounts and answer to the company auditors so I said you know I know that you are very busy today can I suggest that I talk with Maryse and alone he didn't like it then he said have huffed and graft and left the room and I was then alone with Mari as vice president at Olympus Mori reported directly to Woodford who expected transparency and honesty from his staff Woodford was disappointed that Morey had withheld the factor article from him and pressed him further on the allegations of three terrible acquisitions including a face cream and microwave company as well as paying six hundred and eighty seven million dollars in advisory fees to an unknown company in the Cayman Islands [Music] and he just ignored my questions and it was one of the most disorientating things I've ever had in my life I started you know to get tense and with him and I said we bought a company which makes microwave dishes I mean we're a health care company Mari soon it was obvious there was something very wrong but not only were they paying a lot of money for companies that weren't making a lot of money simply put but on top of it they were paying consulting fees for advice that was no way worth that amount of money and I got angry and I got up and I walked around the table and came very close to him and I asked him what I said you know mari san you know who do you work for who do you work for you know as long as I live I'll never forget the mohrís response to that question and he pointed and he said to me I want to cook our son I know how difficult our son [Music] in 2011 English businessman Michael Woodford who'd been brought in to modernize Japanese electronics giants Olympus was being increasingly isolated from company chairman Kiku cauã and other senior managers at Olympus he'd found evidence of serious corporate wrongdoing now he had to make a tough decision do you continue demanding answers or do you quietly fall into line Woodford's mother instilled in him a strong sense of right and wrong when he was still a little boy I remember I went to buy some chocolate and I took some money from her purse and that's what she would notice and when I came back and she was waiting for me and she had quite a temper and I thought I was gonna you know wasn't really gonna be in for it but all she said to me was you know you've stolen money from one of your family you know what does that say about you if I can't trust my own son and you know that that was seared on my consciousness about you know stealing and even if you could get away from it what does it say about you Praveena is a business psychologist with almost two decades of experience what tends to drive a whistleblower to speak out would be where they fall within this continuum of justice and loyalty so if we were to do it like a straight line and justice being over here and loyalty being over here the closer they are to the justice aspect would probably make them more likely to speak out Woodford's connection to olympus began with him working for one of their contractors kee met in 1981 where he run a tight ship this was when he first met working Miller my firm was producing a Japanese language magazine for the British Embassy one of our stops was the company he met in South India and Michael was the president he met at the time we visited my first experience with Michael was having them check the reverse English translation of the draft that we'd written about the company and it was it was a tremendously trying experience he was just absolutely obsessive about perfection Woodford went on to head Olympus entire European business Michael Woodford was very successful in Europe and and he managed to restructure the the European organization in a very solid way it was also very well known for his compliance issues and regulations he strikes me as a real gold Kathir very intelligent very smart business smart but also very well first to lead a team towards success as a company towards a financial solid company and I think that Kiko cover saw at that moment was very appreciated of that and brought him into Tokyo as head of Olympus Europe Woodford made the region the biggest contributor to the company's profits it was then that president Kiku cara offered him the presidency Michael Woodford spent almost his entire career at Olympus so he's always had this reputation of being somebody that was very honest very ethical and would go out of his way to call on people if they weren't being honest and ethical he started off initially at Cadbury Schweppes before that he was an intern in a in a smaller aerospace company and there he already had the reputation of a whistleblower so at the time he had denounced I guess is the word a secretary that had used office stamps to send her holiday post and he had been asked to leave because of that in and then it had proven to be true as woodford approached deeper and demanded answers of the dubious acquisitions his relationship with key cacao errand mori worsened after the showdown over the sushi platter the relationship between myself kicking Karen Murray deteriorate but we went through the motion the allegations against Olympus have been published by factor less than a month ago and Woodford needed to find a way out of the Tokyo office that could allow him to probe further you know I could feel the contempt losing from them they they they I've never felt such loathing in my life I went to a cubicle and and said to him you know I think I should visit our factories which lie outside of Japan and in the Czech Republic in Germany in Britain in America and he snapped at it you know he wanted me out of the Tokyo office as much as I wanted to be out of there and that was the longest business trip I ever went on and it ended in September in New York by this time the pressure of the unlawful allegations was beginning to take its toll I was drinking a lot by then I'm just trying to sedate myself and we went to a steak restaurant and I got back and it was around half past 11:00 at night and I remember going into the bathroom and looking in the mirror and I was 5 kilos less than I am now and dark you know inset eyes but it wasn't my physical condition which is troubling new me I knew my mental well-being my mental health was deteriorating because you know I knew there was a sickness this problem but I wasn't sure of what to do you know how do I deal with it you know the shareholders don't seem interested into financial institutions the media no one seems to you know is it me who's mad he also realized the board was not aligned with him and wouldn't allow any more investigation into the allegations around the he's fraudulent or dubious acquisitions Woodford was having sleepless nights and was becoming dependent on sleeping pills and I remember I had a brown plastic perspex bottle of sleeping tablets and I looked on the back and it said don't mix with an alcohol and I know that's not a good idea but I thought about a worse idea was not to sleep so I took two of them went to sleep almost immediately if you've worked in a company for around 30 years you'd feel very close affinity to that company and to have that company suddenly do something that you're not familiar with or against your personal beliefs that's almost akin to having a family member go against you so that would definitely create feelings of tension that could have manifested in mood swings it could have manifested in sleeplessness it could have manifested in I have not being able to sustain positive relationships in your life when you're traveling particularly become even more addictive you know to opening up your emails to see if there's a message maybe your children have written to you but awaiting woodford in his inbox was worse news the same business magazine had published a follow-up article containing more allegations against Olympus alleging possible links to organized crime but what shocked me it said that these transit transactions will link to anti-social forces a euphemism for the Mafia the Yakuza but the idea that there could be people with tattoos and missing finger digits who might want to hurt me or worse still hit my wife or even worse hurt my children and you know I was a businessman you know III sent out mission statements and answered emails and visited factories I had no knowledge of how to cope with organized crime whistleblowing is not something that is going to be easy for anyone and normally whether or not someone whistle blows will depend a lot on their personal characteristics in Michael Woodford's case perhaps what was going on is what we term dissonance cognitive dissonance and that is basically when an individual holds two contrasting beliefs at the same time and it creates a lot of tension discomfort a lot mental pressures despite the growing psychological pressure woodford continue to press for answers having already tried to raise his concerns in meetings and being rebuffed with tuna sandwiches the revelations in this second factor article encouraged Woodford to put his concerns in writing over the next six weeks Woodford wrote a series of official emails challenging he cacao WA and the Olympus board kiyokawa actually wrote to me and said Michael it's not helpful you asking all these questions I'm sure it wasn't helpful and I copied them to all the board members yets in October 2011 he kook our appointed Woodford CEO as well as president that's what may have seemed to be a positive change was actually hardly publicized in Japan I think what's interesting and one intriguing anecdote is the fact that when Woodford was appointed CEO so even after he was promoted from co2 CEO position his promotion was only written up in the English language website and not on the Japanese website and in actual fact that when I became CEO he had blind utter loyalty from all the other board members who are all Japanese males in the latter stages of their career complete blind loyalty but the promotion didn't stop Woodford from continuing to ask difficult questions he wrote his final email to the board this time copying in an outside auditing firm the last letter I wrote in the UK and I included a report from PwC an independent auditor one of the big four which confirmed the concerns I I had now for the other directors you know 1.7 billion u.s. dollars had been spent on these three Makino's companies and from this consultancy from a company which went to the name of Aksum or asus that yeah you know even if those people were the devil personified for their own self-interest the president is asking to bring in forensic accountants within the same email Woodford explicitly asked for the resignation of Kiku kaua as well as Morey I pressed it I mean what's your thing email syn and then I watched to see because I asked for reply receipts and you know half an hour later I saw that the Japanese director working in the United States responded and you have read it and then obviously he had phoned and woke in everyone up in Tokyo and they all started to come in woodford was summoned to an extraordinary board meeting back in Tokyo I walk into the boardroom at a few minutes before nine this in a long board table again but the board meeting has a lot of pomp and ceremony and there's all these people on a second a group of chairs behind in tables translators and note takers and advisors and all sorts of people and when I walk in it was noisy much more noisy and it reminded me of one of those wildlife programs with hyenas it had that feel of hysteria in the room I sitting there feeling very uncomfortable noting that nobody will look at me you know this nonverbal communication and a few minutes past 9:00 and I start to look at my watch in an exaggerated manner because meetings never start late [Music] this was the meeting that would change the fates of Olympus and Woodford forever [Music] English businessman Michael Woodford had taken an extraordinary business decision demanding the resignation of the top man at Olympus the same man who had given him his job the board immediately called an emergency meeting almost 15 minutes later Kiku kaua turned up and kicking power didn't come to his seat at the top of the table he went to the podium in the in the far corner of the room he got this tatty piece of paper out of his pocket and said today's meetings to discuss serious concerns about ellipses and he said that has been cancelled that agenda and the new agenda is the dismissal of Michael Woodford as president represented director and CEO and on the last syllable all the people around the table put their hands up supporting the motion that I'm dismissing I wanted to speak at the board meeting I had document had prepared the night before of questions I wanted to ask but I was told that I wasn't allowed to speak less than 8 months after being named president of the Japanese electronics brand and barely a fortnight after becoming CEO Michael Woodford was left with no choice but to pack his belongings and leave the building but just as he was leaving another senior Olympus executive entered his office and he's a big guy as big as me and he came up to me and he called me by my first name Michael I don't mind what people call me but he didn't normally it was Woodford sir no president in Japanese but did get it was a way of asserting and he said to me give me your computers and I said I can't because they've already gone back to the UK securely he got very angry and then demanded my mobile phones and I had a samsung which I gave him and I smiled at him and said I've wiped it and then I had my Apple iPhone and I said again I got angry and said you know my wife is gonna be worried you know who are you or you you were policeman you know they're gonna take it off me I'm not gonna give it you Woodford's translator an American who now calls himself Waku Miller but work closely with him and was handling his corporate relations with the Japanese media he was one of the first to find out about the sacking they fire me because even though he's been in the organization for thirty years they've discovered with her great surprise that this person is in fact unilateral and arbitrary in his management style and that he's simply not suited to a Japanese organization he was going to get to the bottom of what had happened at this company and Olympus was management did not want that to happen Woodford left the olympus office and headed back to his apartment in tokyo at the reception area he noticed several heavily muscled men were these people and I just fed my fear and I very particularly the way I packed because I travel a lot but I just threw everything into this case and was out of the eight or nine minutes and they were still there in the library downstairs you know I was sweating profusely I was starting to tremble I found Jonathan sober from there who was the Financial Times correspondent in Japan and I said Jonathan you know there's so much more to this you know can we meet and he said there's a small cafe across the road and we met in there 10 minutes later my first question was you know are you okay what happened he said there's hundreds of millions of dollars missing and it became clear that he was worried that he was in danger that people might be following him or worse a lot of money had left Olympus a lot of money had been taken out of this company in mysterious and suspicious ways we explained what he thought was happening inside polenta's he presented me with a binder full of evidence to back up his case and then he went to the airport he took his suitcase and said and I get on the first plane that I can I don't feel safe and I spent the next few hours going through his evidence of course I contacted Olympus to get a comment from them you spoke talked to overly editors and lawyers and the thing he said to me before he left was you know can I trust you to carry this story through and then 10 hours later he he got off that plane in a plane and Heathrow and his wife was there with the copy of the FT that she bought at the airport I think with his story on the front page back in the UK Woodford was determined to hold key cacao and his board accountable he did as many interviews with the international press as possible making sure that the scandal went global all of them have to go all of them have to go if they don't then that means there's a tolerance of the either incompetence or much much worse as well as continuing to talk to the media he started planning his next direct move against Olympus I'd put together a new board of Japanese or Japanese senior figures but the institutional shareholders it became clear they wouldn't speak out they wouldn't criticize Olympus this is the three mega banks and the insurance company you know whilst I'd hoped I could get Olympus back on you know the right path I I knew it was beyond my abilities to change Japan you know corporate Japan needed to change and you know I I couldn't do that Olympus stuck to their story their official stance Woodford did not understand Japanese business practices a new president was brought in for damage control you know Joshua collectimus doodles you are a familiar name because just mythology only to consider the snail hi Hannah Akito Leo console.log events I think that they were just desperately hoping they could get away with it that they could contain it but they could discredit him the whole way along they underestimated how much was going to come out no matter what they said they would admit only the bare minimum that people are basically with one company for all their career and I think this sort of dominates a lot of the things that we see in the Japanese company because often what is called loyalty might also be dependence for someone for his career for his well-being and I've heard the Japanese media described by many as sycophantic that they they bow down to the big Japanese corporations and don't want to rock the boat and ask the difficult questions and definitely from the outside looking at how they behaved as a former journalist myself that's exactly what they were doing in this case while the Japanese media shied away from the story the international media latched on to it the sheer scale of the fraud meant that the fallout was going to get bigger [Music] mark Worthington is an expert on how to manage business scandals after a decade as correspondent for BBC News he currently oversees crisis communication strategies for several multinational corporations the fact that the the company was still denying even when the international media were were writing openly about the allegations and and referring to the CEO as being the one who was was making them is quite extraordinary it's hard to see how that could happen anywhere else other than Japan it seemed a pretty indefensible position and yet the denials were still coming and a motivating factor for that can only be the kind of corporate loyalty and that culture that you find in Japan that was hugely damaging to their reputation in a situation like this when a company like Olympus faces these kinds of challenges the worst thing you can possibly do is be seen to be denying lying covering up by November 2011 Olympus finally admitted to hiding massive losses the company revealed that they'd made dubious acquisitions to cover up bad investments this is before 1990 it had taken 20 years for their wrongdoings to come to light Kiku kaua resigned two weeks prior to the admissions and Murray was dismissed for his role in the fraud but this was only the beginning of a massive shake-up within the Olympus board in December retired Supreme Court Judge Kanaka reported and just a huge report and described Olympus as a board of yes-man and vindicated the action had take him which then led really to the whole board having to step down at the extraordinary general meeting the following April today at those meetings for the first time I had a sense of relief comparable to when Jonathan published is that this story will be different the Tokyo District Court ruled that dismissed president Tsuyoshi Kikukawa and five other members of the board had to pay more than five hundred million u.s. dollars to Olympus but the damage had already been done Olympus shares which remained steady since the scandal broke out suddenly plummeted by almost 70 percent in less than a month the impact of this scandal on Olympus reputationally in terms of its finances in terms of its staff were colossal and cannot be underestimated if we start on a reputational level they became almost the poster child for corporate fraud corporate failure corporate cover-up and their name became synonymous with those things the olympus case raised wider questions on how corporations were managed japanese financial regulators had long tolerated a common business practice of hiding losses known in japan as to boshy what happened is that in the 80s many companies had some problems growing their main markets any longer especially after the revaluation of the yen and the very end increased in value and maybe some of their overseas markets broke away Japanese companies looked for other way to increase their revenues many of these companies made disastrous investments that ended up in massive losses and when the Japanese bubble finally burst most of the corporations didn't know how to cover their tracks the tabash II was a way to hide those losses in some affiliated companies maybe with some other companies so that the losses would not appear in the books of the main and in the statements parent statements of the main company any longer and but eventually they had to pay up for that and I think this is bendin companies got into problems finding ways to make up for those losses the tepache scheme was banned in early 2000s but there are still Japanese corporations that continue with it behind closed doors in 2015 Toshiba president PSL Tanaka was forced to step down at the electronics and computer Giants when a similar scandal came to light since the olympus scandal there's been a new corporate governance code put in place that recommends things like putting independent directors on the boards of every company that kind of thing which had not been common you know in japan before that this effort was under way before the olympus scandal but the olympus scandal I think definitely gave it a kind of tailwind that helped the helped convince does you know some skeptics thought it was worthwhile to try and try and repair you know the the reputation for Japanese financial markets and companies for a lot of people there's no sense to leave the company immediately because the fundamentals of the company and the structure that was in the various regions and then the various organizations wasn't was it was good but change was still needed at the top a new board took over the reins from Kiku caua and set out to restructure the company they wanted to go back into the core business of medical clinical division microscopy products and the camera products they also took a number of steps in terms of corporate governance reporting making sure they had external auditors that were really independent and not linked to the board in any way the scandal was reminiscent of the collapse of American gas and energy giants Enron some 10 years before this led to a commitments to the comprehensive reform of business practices setting new compliance standards for corporate management the olympus case did for japan what Enron did for the u.s. so every time you have a scandal policymakers shareholders boards will question the way business was always done and whether it should be done this way and just like it change anyone changed the governance policies and the board liabilities and so on in the US Olympus did the same thing for Japanese businesses when we look at Olympus today it is hugely different to the Olympus at the time the scandal took place and the fact that Trust had been completely destroyed left them with no choice but to completely rebuild and to rebuild very openly so we saw the new management talk about total transparency in 2012 Olympus released a report to reassure their investors led by new president Hiroyuki Sasser from their medical equipment marketing division and former banker Yasuyuki camuto as their new chairman the board promised to win back public trust and to prevent another scandal from occurring [Music] they comprehensively overhauled the way that the company was structured the way that it communicated the way that it was governed making sure that checks and balances were in place but also demonstrating openly to investors in the outside world what was happening because in a situation like the one Olympus faced when you are that broken and your reputation is that low you're not going to be able to communicate your way out of that situation you have to demonstrate what you're doing a new set of protocols was put in place to regain the public's trust and it started with the most basic regulations and signatories the way Olympus was recovering and gained a trust effect from the public and from their customers was to put regulations in place regulations on signatories people for certain amounts a certain level of signatures were required and over always in twofold others were regulations that all the staff had to sign forms that they will not conduct any wrongdoings with money like bribery's or even sponsorships etc so everything was very much scrutinized so once this the the company was restructured or the board of the company was restructured and everything recovered quite easily because the the the local structures of the the organizations were very solid and very good despite the scandal the public perception of Olympus as a manufacturer of high-tech cameras hasn't faded and the tech team is still creating new products that keep the brand relevant Lance all is a camera fan who swears by the Olympus equipment range he's been using their cameras since 2002 and vouchers for their quality which has vastly improved despite the internal mismanagement mm sure they are the first one who introduced a file exists image stabilization which is the first in the world and also that is the game changer for the whole mirrorless system where all other brands started something to errorless system where to compete with are all of us mirrorless cameras drastically reduced the size of previously bulky DSLR systems without sacrificing image quality a camera setup is now a fraction of what it used to cost making photography much more affordable to both professionals as well as enthusiasts the greatness of our dish for our the bus to go into micro Fatih where they make the camera smaller yet you can still have digital as our image quality this changed the whole ballgame where they become the leading brand of mirrors and to today they are still one of the leading brands of our camera system of mirrorless camera system since the fraud Michael Woodford has published a book exposure inside the Olympus scandal detailing his role as a whistleblower in the indictment of the former Olympus board these days Woodford works as a consultant for many large companies advising them on how to prevent the same thing from happening to their corporations signs that that Olympus has come out of the crisis now all around us their name is no longer a name that is associated with the misdeeds of the past probably the first indicator to the outside world is the share price when the confidence starts to return and that's the market looking at the steps that have been taken reading in-depth the documents that are setting out the new corporate governance policies the philosophies of the new leadership so six years on they still have a big share of the market in endoscopy and microscopy and they're they're doing very well with her camera business so they were able to turn around and and they're doing well again goes back from the brink [Music] [Music] [Music] you you

Channel: CNA

Views: 81,607

Rating: 4.7716703 out of 5

Keywords: inside the storm, olympus, business documentary, olympus business, business stories, business insider, tv video

Id: n_Ihcl-1OIk

Length: 47min 44sec (2864 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mootbrute]

So MR. "Dont steal stamps" captain ethical who was the head of the medical division had NO IDEA his company was paying doctors to use their products as a common practice. They were setting him up to be the fall guy and he figured it out before they could get him imbedded enough to plausibly frame him for it. He didn't even figure it out, someone else reported it. He realized he was screwed either way and decided to play it as a whistleblower. They are a terrible company and I hope they fail.