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Vol.16
Risk Management Part1. |
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Some ten years ago, I received
a request from a foreign
affiliated firm to establish a
risk management system. At that
time, the phrase “risk
management” itself was not
familiar in Japan, and even
books specializing in the field
were full of general statements
and therefore useless,
according to the client.
To explain the background
of this case, there was
apparently a manual that the
client’s parent company had
created. However, the parent
company was at the time in the
midst of a large-scale
personnel reduction following
its acquisition of a sector
peer company, and the top
executives had swapped their
cars for ones with bulletproof
windows. The client was
distressed because a manual of
such level did not match the
reality of Japanese society.
As we were inexperienced
in this consulting field, we
declined once, only to accept
it upon the insistence of the
client. Nonetheless, we needed
to learn from scratch. We had,
however, been receiving
individual investigation
requests from the same client,
who was experiencing various
types of in-house problems from
around that time, which enabled
us to systematize these cases
in order to understand the big
picture. We also conducted a
detailed research and analysis
of the client’s head office,
factories and laboratories.
As a result, we were able
to create a risk management
system with both the hard
(structural) component and the
soft (personnel) component. One
of the things I noticed through
this job was that there is a
big difference between Western
and Japanese cultures.
In the recent years, the
Japanese people have been
shocked time and again by
crimes that they have not
experienced before. Japan was
once one of the safest
societies among the developed
countries. Why did this start
to collapse? We will discuss
its causes in the next article.
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