11/18 “Director Boot Camp” Held by Zoom! Next Courses: 2022.2.7!


 

On July 13th, still in the midst of the pandemic, BDTI held its English Director Boot Camp via teleconference. The day-long intensive course was attended by 6 highly-experienced and highly interactive participants. The participants heard lectures about corporate governance by Nicholas Benes along with a guest lecture by Andrew Silberman of AMT, and exchanged experiences and opinions. Even during a pandemic, training continued smoothly, with all participants chiming in with insightful comments and questions.

We are planning to hold the next course on February 7(Mon)2022. Sign up early! Please see a description of our director training course here or click the button below for further information.

Eiichi Shibusawa: The Spirit of Japanese Ethical Capitalism & Sustainability

Ken Shibusawa and Christina Ahmadjian, and Joshua W Walker Thank you –that was an excellent, concise explanation/introduction about ” Eiichi Shibusawa: The Spirit of Japanese Ethical Capitalism & Sustainability”. Well done! To others: worth watching. I am always impressed by how deeply persons like Shibusawa thought about issues related to capitalism and its related social issues that need to be addressed, even at very early stages in its birth. When I have taught business ethics, I really appreciate reading the thoughts of Shibusawa, Adam Smith, Andrew Carnegie, and others. (webinar by the @JapanSociety_SF @japansociety )

Posted by Nicholas Benes

METRICAL: CG Stock Performance – October 2021

Stock market declines in October. CG Top 20 stocks significantly outperformed the index.

In a reversal of the previous month’s sharp rise, the stock market plunged in the first half of October, followed by a market stalemate ahead of financial reports starting at the end of the month. Topix and JPX400 indices fell -1.34% and -1.35%, respectively, during the month of October, while the CGTop20, the top CG rating score, outperformed both indices by a smaller margin, -0.41%.

METRICAL: Considerations for Nominating Committees

Nominating committees are the most difficult issue in corporate governance practices. Since the election (nomination) of directors is a matter that involves personnel rights, and personnel is also a matter that has a great deal to do with compensation, the CEO is still deeply involved in this decision in many companies, especially in Japan where the board of directors is composed of many inside directors. It is not difficult to imagine that there would be resistance to delegating this decision-making authority to independent outside directors. To conclude, even if a nominating committee has been established, it is impossible to know whether the committee is functioning properly without a close examination of the substance of the committee. In order to check whether the nominating committee is functioning properly, the first point to be considered is whether the majority of the members of the committee are independent outside directors, and whether the committee is chaired by an independent outside director. However, a prerequisite for this is that the board of directors must be prepared to accept decisions on director nominations made through a transparent and objective process. This can be thought of as the board of directors itself being operated in a transparent and objective manner. As a measure of this, I would like to examine whether independent outside directors make up the majority of the board of directors. If the board of directors is dominated by inside directors, it is unclear whether the process of nominating directors is carried out in a transparent and objective manner, and it is also unclear whether the board of directors approves the proposed candidates for directors submitted by the nominating committee.

First of all, as shown in the table below, the current status of the nominating committees of all listed companies in Japan is as follows: of the 3,733 companies that submitted corporate governance reports out of the 3,784 companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as of October 1, 2021, 82 companies (2% of the total) are companies with nominating committees under the law. (2% of the total). There were 1,249 companies with audit committees and 2,401 companies with board of corporate auditors, of which 609 companies (49%) and 1,046 companies (44%) had voluntary nominating committees in their respective organizational forms.