Michael Woodford Knihy

The author was a company man. He'd risen through the ranks of giant Japanese firm Olympus to become CEO. But just weeks into the job in Tokyo he came across allegations of enormous fraud. Yet his every attempt at investigation was blocked. Then he did something Olympus didn't expect. He fought back. This title tells his story.

When Michael Woodford was made President and CEO of Olympus, he became the first Westerner ever to climb the ranks of one of Japan's corporate icons. Some wondered at the appointment - how could a gaijin (foreigner) who didn't even speak Japanese understand how to run a Japanese company? But within months Woodford had gained the confidence of colleagues and shareholders. Then his dream job turned into a nightmare. He learned about a series of bizarre mergers and acquisitions deals totalling $1.7 billion - a scandal which if exposed threatened to bring down the entire company. He turned to his fellow executives - including the chairman who had promoted him - for answers. But instead of being heralded as a hero for trying to save Olympus, Woodford was met with hostility and a cover-up. Within weeks he was fired in a boardroom coup that shocked the international business world. As rumours emerged of Yakuza (mafia) involvement in the scandal, Woodford fled Japan in fear of his life. He went straight to the press - becoming the first CEO of a multinational to blow the whistle on his own company. Following his departure Woodford faced months of agonizing pressure that threatened his health and his family life. But instead of succumbing he persisted, and eventually the men who had ousted him were held to account. Exposure is the story of how Michael Woodford chose the truth over a multimillion-dollar salary, and exposed the dark heart of the company he had dedicated his life to. He also paints a devastating portrait of corporate Japan - an insular, hierarchy-driven culture that prefers maintaining the status quo to exposing ugly truths. The result is a deeply personal memoir that reads like a thriller. As Woodford himself puts it, 'I thought I was going to run a health-care and consumer electronics company but found I had walked into a John Grisham novel.

With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, any pretense of a connection of the world's currencies to any real commodity has been abandoned. Yet since the 1980s, most central banks have abandoned money-growth targets as practical guidelines for monetary policy as well. How then can pure "fiat" currencies be managed so as to create confidence in the stability of national units of account?Interest and Prices seeks to provide theoretical foundations for a rule-based approach to monetary policy suitable for a world of instant communications and ever more efficient financial markets. In such a world, effective monetary policy requires that central banks construct a conscious and articulate account of what they are doing. Michael Woodford reexamines the foundations of monetary economics, and shows how interest-rate policy can be used to achieve an inflation target in the absence of either commodity backing or control of a monetary aggregate. The book further shows how the tools of modern macroeconomic theory can be used to design an optimal inflation-targeting regime--one that balances stabilization goals with the pursuit of price stability in a way that is grounded in an explicit welfare analysis, and that takes account of the "New Classical" critique of traditional policy evaluation exercises. It thus argues that rule-based policymaking need not mean adherence to a rigid framework unrelated to stabilization objectives for the sake of credibility, while at the same time showing the advantages of rule-based over purely discretionary policymaking.

Michael Woodfords Geschichte liest sich wie die Handlung eines John Grisham Buches und ist doch Realität: vom erfolgreichen CEO des japanischen Megaunternehmens Olympus zum Whistleblower, der schließlich gegen das Unternehmen agierte und dortige betrügerische Machenschaften an die Presse weitergab. In seinem Buch „Enthüllung“ ist diese Geschichte nun nachzulesen. Beginnend mit der E-Mail, die ihn zum ersten Mal auf den vertuschten Skandal aufmerksam machte, über die furchteinflößenden Gerüchte, dass sogar die Yakuza in die Machenschaften von Olympus verwickelt sei und ihn zum Schweigen bringen sollte, bis hin zu seinem mutigen Schritt alles offenzulegen. Das Besondere an Woodfords Buch ist nicht nur die Schilderung seiner eigenen dramatischen Erfahrung, sondern auch, dass er in „Enthüllung“ das Bild einer Unternehmenskultur zeichnet, in der blinde Loyalität gegenüber dem Chef über allem steht, sogar über ethischen und moralischen Prinzipien.