When Michael Woodford became president and CEO of Olympus in April, he thought it was the ideal culmination of his 30-year career with the Japanese camera and medical equipment company, said Karl Taro Greenfeld in Bloomberg Businessweek. But “I had no idea I was walking into a John Grisham novel,” he says. Shortly after taking the top post, the 51-year-old Briton uncovered a massive, $1.7 billion fraud on the company’s books. When he began asking questions, he was summarily fired by the board. Publicly, it said his aggressive Western management style didn’t fit the company’s culture, a dig at his status as the first non-Japanese to lead Olympus. But the Liverpool native refused to go quietly. He went public with his allegations, even though he feared for his life because Japanese organized crime syndicates were rumored to be involved in the scandal. “It’s in my makeup” to expose the truth, he says.
For Olympus, the fallout from Woodford’s campaign has been swift, said Hiroko Tabuchi in The New York Times. Chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa resigned within weeks of Woodford’s firing, and last week, he and six others were arrested in Tokyo. Though Woodford fears he is now unemployable, he’d do it again. He says he went “to hell and back,” but feels vindicated by the outcome.
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