What to do if you’re invoved in a corporate scandal?

March 4, 2007
By Ken Worsley

Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance recently invited the public to submit haikus for a competition. This is one of the senryu satirical haikus that they received:

Scandals
not having increased
but brought to light

Yesterday’s Yomiuri reports:

According to Keiko Komahashi, associate professor of Tokyo Keizai University, stories carried by the four major vernacular dailies on corporate scandals amounted to about 1,000 in 1990. The number shot up to about 10,000 in the 2000s: “In recent years, corporate scandals began to be treated as big news by the media and on the Internet. There have emerged more cases in which long-standing bad practices have been revealed.”

Having management appear at news conferences and try to blame rogue part-time workers for longstanding bad (or even illegal) practices just won’t work. How will management react to the fact that PR is so significant in today’s business world?

Filed Under Business, Japan