Third Party Opinion/Independent Review
Third-Party Opinion
Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo
Itaru Yasui, PhD
The Executive Comment from President Koshiba in this CSR Report shows that he is very clear about what he intends to do regarding the management of the company. Currently in Japan, very few people are clear about their goals and how they want to live on this earth. At the very least, the top management of a company should be clear about their future vision—This is what I said during this year’s stakeholder dialogue meeting. The reason I said this was because I had heard about the length of the term of office for the CEO of US General Electric Company.
It was in 2000 that the current CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt took over from former CEO Jack Welch. Immelt was born in 1956 and is still young, but because the term of office for the CEO at GE is about 15 years, the CEO needs to take office at around age 50 at the latest to complete the term of office. This long term of office for a CEO is considered by GE as necessary for pursuing longterm growth as a manufacturer.
To secure strong competitiveness, it is essential for manufacturers—material manufacturers in particular—to maintain superior R&D capabilities from a long-term perspective. Although R&D does not always succeed, expanding technical capabilities from a long-term perspective is the social responsibility of material manufacturers, and to fulfill this responsibility, manufacturers need to understand user needs accurately. It is essential to grasp user needs on a global level.
Of course, there are risks. Grasping trends on a global level is something that cannot be done on an individual basis. Nevertheless, decisions must still be made by an individual. This problem can be solved only when a group organization in which everyone makes utmost efforts to accomplish the goals of the head office is established and when an information network is developed.
With regard to the JSR Group, the fact that JSR Micro, Inc. in the United States issued their own CSR report after being inspired by the CSR Report of the Group is one piece of evidence that confirms the Group’s strong unity. The fact that JSR was listed in several SRI indexes and that the company was selected for inclusion in the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes Asia Pacific in 2012 proves that the effectiveness of the Group’s CSR framework was justly recognized.
For JSR, a Japanese chemical company that has already begun working on the biodiversity issue and that leads others in CSR, what should be done in the future to prevent being overtaken by competitors? In my view, the company needs to confirm once again what social responsibilities they can fulfill in the conduction of their primary business of material manufacturing, and to make their CSR activities more systematic and easy to understand.
For the company positioned at the top, it is meaningless to try to learn things from the outside world. Just as with developing innovation in materials, the company needs to develop innovative methodologies for CSR by themselves. Toward this end, as pointed out by Ikujiro Nonaka in his book “The Knowledge-Creating Company,” the company needs to create a place for deliberation, discuss issues heatedly over and over again, and organize and structure the wisdom gained through such discussions, turning it into explicit knowledge that can be understood by the public. This is the very technique that the company needs to maintain.
Independent Review
The CSR Report 2013 (Japanese version) has been reviewed by the Responsible Care Verification Center and we have received their subsequent Independent Review Report. The Independent Review Report, which includes an explanation of its purpose, scope and procedures, indicated that no areas requiring material revisions to the Japanese version of the CSR Report 2013 were found.