Category: Other News

The Board Director Training Institute of Japan (BDTI) is a government-certified nonprofit providing one-day “director training” courses in English and Japanese, and governance-related seminars and e-learning courses. These programs teach participants key knowledge needed to serve on, report to, or analyze boards in Japan.

What topics are covered by such programs, and why? What issues surround the introduction of director training, or governance training, in the case of Japan? Why is training believed to be utterly essential to the success of Japan’s corporate governance reforms? What is the best approach – who needs to betrained, how? Why is the potential upside for Japan’s economy big?

In this seminar event, the proposer of Japan’s Corporate Governance Code will answer these questions, using the binders and documents that are actually used in BDTI’s English course. The program will kick off with lunch at 12:oo noon. Starting about 4:00 pm until 6:00 pm, the lecturer will lead interactive discussion about what the reforms mean from an investor’s perspective, what changes and debates are taking place “behind the scenes” in Japanese companies now, and what sort of tactics for investment and engagement with Japanese companies are likely to be most effective.

BDTI’s July 14th English Director Boot Camp was a great success, with active participation by a diverse group of Japanese, American、and Asian persons!  Everyone in the room benefited  from the perspectives and experience of this high-level group.

On May 12th, BDTI held  its English Director Boot Camp , attended by a number of highly experienced participants. Participants from various companies heard lectures about corporate governance by Nicholas Benes and Andrew Silberman of AMT, and exchanged experiences and opinions at a spacious, comfortable room  kindly donated for our use by Cosmo Public Relations, a leading communications and PR firm in Tokyo.

We are planning to hold the next course on July 14th. Sign up early!

Below is BDTI’s recent report to its Sustaining Donors , who are listed here and described in Note 1 below. BDTI is now raising funds for FY2016, so if you are interested to support the cause of injecting deep understanding and substance into Japan’s recent governance reforms, please consider making a donation.

• We aggressively followed up on my proposal to create a Corporate Governance Code for Japan, which became a reality in June thanks to the fine efforts of many others (See Note 2) over many years. We gave a number of seminars (and still are) on the most important aspects of the CG Code, how to approach compliance with it, and the need for companies to produce their own “CG Guidelines” in order to actually have the policies (and substance) they claim they have in TSE governance reports. This was a concept that BDTI (myself) had proposed and promoted from the very start, a year before the CG Code came into effect.
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  Our activities last year included producing example CG Guidelines, numerous BDTI seminars or speaking engagements, and a large joint seminar with Mizuho Research (we will have another soon.) These efforts were successful in encouraging approximately 30% of Japanese companies to produce corporate governance guidelines, even thought the quality of many of these still needs to be improved. See the results of this survey.