Careers: Life as a Corporate General Counsel and Executive Officer

Hi there and welcome to the podcast Life As, a show intently focused on exploring and unearthing the details of professions and the people behind them. I'm your host, Christopher Schoenwald.

When considering global enterprise and what specific corporations do, it's easy to get fixated on the basic service or product they provide. Nike makes shoes, Amazon operates an online marketplace, Microsoft makes software. However, we all know that such global conglomerates are involved in much more as far as operations and services go. Take a company like Panasonic, for example. It has over 260,000 employees and roughly 580 subsidiaries around the world, involved in the production and selling of a wide range of products and services including air conditioners, refrigerators, lighting, television, personal computers, mobile phones, audio equipment, cameras, broadcasting equipment, semiconductors, bicycles, and so on. Now, keeping a multinational corporation like that on track and aligned is no simple task. It requires a certain degree of sophistication involving effective governance and strategy. To add to the complexity is the fact that these companies exist in markets that are themselves in a constant state of flux, driven by hyper-connected economies. Within the last several years, it is this last point which has driven corporations to innovate and adapt as far as finding more effective ways to navigate this ever-changing landscape. What have they done? What has been their proverbial ace in the hole to handle all of this? Well, without a question, part of the answer surely lies with the enhanced role of corporate general counsel, as well as a larger voice from legal and compliance experts. Now, it's rare to get a peek into how such a mechanism exercises itself and extends influence in a major multinational corporation. However, our esteemed guest today will provide all of that, and I suspect much more.

Lawrence Bates has provided legal counsel for over three decades to some of the largest business entities in Japan. He has held executive level positions at General Electric and the Lixel Group Corporation over that time. Most recently, he served as Managing Executive Officer, General Counsel, Chief Risk Management Officer, and Chief Compliance Officer for Panasonic Corporation, a position and role in which he was the first appointed non-Japanese board member in the company's illustrious history. Lawrence's impressive communicative skills, fluency in both Mandarin Chinese and Japanese, coupled with a stellar educational background with degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School, set Lawrence on a path not many have trailblazed. Lawrence's deep knowledge, awareness, and passion relating to legal and compliance issues has helped bring those points to the forefront of the companies he has served within. In fact, in one case, this recognition amounted to a rare act within a listed Japanese company: the establishment of a new executive position centered on legal and compliance issues, of which Larry was naturally appointed to. Outside of his corporate career, Lawrence has also been active in many other respects. He has taught international economic law on the faculty of law at Tokyo University and has been an active member of the Tokyo expat community, holding the presidency of the ACCJ, American Chamber of Commerce Japan, in 2013. Lawrence has also engaged with the Japan-based Lawyers for LGBT and Allies Network to promote marriage equality in Japan, the only country in the G7 that does not fully recognize same-sex partnerships. And with all that in mind, Lawrence, welcome.

Thank you very much, Chris. It's a pleasure to be here, and please do call me Larry going forward. I'm very happy to be here.

All right, will do. Yeah, it's an honor to have you on. So without further ado, why don't we get right into things?

Sure.

All right. Well, the first segment is something called Coloring Wikipedia. As my listeners would know, it's basically a segment where I just read off a definition of the profession, what the guest does. I like to do it for a couple of reasons. One, it brings everyone up to speed, and two, I think it offers a nice jumping off point for the guests to examine the way the position is presented, at least as far as Wikipedia, and how they go about it. Sometimes there are things that are underrepresented, sometimes things are missing, and it just gets the discussion kicked off in the right way. So, in recognizing many of your professional titles, I did go with a catch-all of General Counsel, but perhaps from there we can weave in some other equally important titles and roles that you've had along the way. Does that sound good?

Sounds perfect.

All right, well here we go. General Counsel: A General Counsel, Chief Counsel, or Chief Legal Officer (CLO) is the chief lawyer of a legal department, usually in a company or a governmental department. Duties involve overseeing and identifying the legal issues in all departments and their interrelation, including engineering, design, marketing, sales, distribution, credit, finance, human resources, and production, as well as corporate governance and business policy. This would naturally require, in most cases, reporting directly to the owner or CEO, overseeing the very business on which the CLO is expected to be familiar with and advise on the most confidential level. This requires the CLO or General Counsel to work closely with each of the other officers and their departments to appropriately be aware and advise. A bit of a mouthful, admittedly, but within the context of what you've done and perhaps your most recent role, how well does Wikipedia fare on this, Larry?

Well, I actually think it fares pretty well. It covers most of the bases. I guess if I had two reactions to it where I might improve it, and maybe that's something I think about. 'Advise' I think was the word that was used at one point, and I think that's part of it, but I think the idea of a General Counsel or a Chief Legal Officer, which I use somewhat interchangeably, I've had both titles in my career, is really to have an equal seat with the other executive management at the decision-making table on a strategic level, utilizing all those skills that you just mentioned from a legal perspective and a broader business perspective. So I would say it's playing an active part in business making, leveraging those skills. And I guess the other thing that might be missing from that rather broad list is public policy or government relations, the idea that one should use one's legal skills in helping to shape the business policy environment externally, because in the end, that is also all about law. So I guess those would be the two comments I might make on that otherwise excellent definition.

Okay, well that's good to hear. Wikipedia doesn't often do so well from my experience on this program, so it's nice to hear that they are on point for this one at least. Really quickly, we'll probably get into this later on in the conversation, but in terms of this role, and I alluded to this in the bio, there is the enhanced role of some of these responsibilities. Is that something that you've noticed over the last, say, five to ten years?

Well, definitely here in Japan, but it started I think really in the United States back in the 1980s, around the time that I was graduating from law school, where I think the in-house General Counsel position even there was considered a bit of a back office operation and not really up front at the business decision-making table. The first company I joined, GE, and its General Counsel then, Ben Heinemann, I think really changed the nature of all that in the United States to make it what I think Wikipedia and I would now describe right. But I think in Japan, the change has been tremendous in recent years, and there's still perhaps a long way to go. In Japan in particular, there was no concept of a General Counsel role until very recently, and I think many listed companies still do not have such a role, or if they do have a legal role, it often reports indirectly, as was traditionally the case here in Japan, through another function like the CFO or the CHRO or a Chief Operations Officer or planning. So I think it's changed a lot, and there's a much greater recognition of the need for it, but it's still not at the same level as you would see or expect in most American or European companies.

Well, it's encouraging, I suppose, like you said, that there is some change taking place, and perhaps through some of your experiences and what you've seen and even what you've contributed to that as well, I'm sure is probably helping. I used the word 'trailblazing,' I didn't choose that word randomly. I think there is something to that, and in a corporation such as Panasonic, your most recent company, I'm sure that gets out within the industry and it has the power of at least making people think or consider different ways of doing things.

Well, I think the globalization of Japanese companies themselves, as they've expanded into dozens, if not more, markets across the globe, have encountered the same types of legal and compliance challenges that their American and European counterparts have long been accustomed to. And I think to ultimately be successful and competitive and have an upper hand in many of these situations as good corporate citizens, that has really propelled change in Japan, where I think there wasn't necessarily always a strong enforcement driver here in Japan itself.

Right, right. No, that's really interesting. Okay, well I would like to transition to another question really quickly here. Again, your most recent work has been with Panasonic, and as far as some of these other roles and responsibilities you've had, what would be, I mean this might be an impossible question, but what would be like a typical day for you, or typical week perhaps? Maybe that's a little bit easier.

These other roles being within Panasonic or generally over the...?

Sorry, within Panasonic. Yeah.

Yeah, so the other roles that I've had within Panasonic at the same time have been, as you mentioned very kindly in your introduction, Chief Risk Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, a member of the board, and member of the Group Strategy Meeting as a management managing executive. So day to day, I'm wearing different hats in what I'm doing within the company, but I think it all kind of fits broadly within that definition of General Counsel that we talked about at the very beginning. I think the General Counsel has to be strategic, and maybe the one thing I left out, but also has to be a bit of a guardian of the company's reputation. And I think putting me at the board level when I joined the company was a pretty significant statement by top level management that the importance of legal and compliance has really grown in Japan in a global company such as this. So I have to play a role there that's a little bit different day-to-day than what I do on an operational basis in terms of strategy and really making key fundamental decisions for the direction of the company. But day to day, my biggest priorities over the past four years have been how to really build a compliance global infrastructure, the human resources and the organization around that. And you would be surprised perhaps that the role of General Counsel contains as much human resource work as it does, because building the organization and the people are critically important.

Yeah, most definitely. And I guess, again, stepping into that position which, as I mentioned, didn't really exist before you moved into it, I'm sure there was a lot of feeling out, not only on your behalf but probably within internally, the people that you're working with and how their roles are attached to your responsibilities and so on and so forth. I'm sure there's a lot of give and take there and feeling each other out.

Yeah, and I think compliance might have been a fundamental driver in the first instance, which is why we added the title of Chief Compliance Officer to the General Counsel title. I think in my view, compliance is fundamentally a role of the General Counsel in any case. But Panasonic had had a recent history, in the early 2000s, of experiences in a negative sense with global cartels and competition law issues, and more recently a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bribery issue involving an avionics subsidiary in the United States. So there was, I think, a top level recognition that there needed to be a different or an additional voice at the table with the right fees that had not been there before.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, well I think that paints a much clearer picture for a lot of listeners. I know it does for me, so thank you for sharing that. Perhaps we could transition into a new segment here. Basically, we can do this back and forth in a Q&A discovery, and the first question I have here is within the context of this talk. I was thinking that maybe we could get a quick overview of some of your backstory, your journey, of what led you into all this professional success that you've experienced across your career. Have there been particular moments or experiences that in reflection now are critical junctures perhaps leading to present day and where you've ended up essentially? Could you speak to that?

Well, I think I joined General Electric back in 1992 on the basis of a call from a recruiter five days after I had been witnessing on Japanese national television a story about a bribery case at then General Electric's Medical System subsidiary here in Tokyo. And I had not thought about joining a corporation when I originally studied law and was working in a law firm, but wanted to combine it with my cultural skills and language skills. The more I talked about it, the role seemed incredibly interesting. But during the course of setting up the culture when I eventually joined the company and working with the business management, there were some really eye-opening, distressing moments where we wondered, could we in Asia, including in Japan, really operate business in the way that an American company was used to and expected from a standard, in particular related to gifts, entertainment, and all those types of issues. And I had a few sleepless nights and lots of discussions with sales managers and business management as to how we were going to unearth every risk touch point and deal with it in the appropriate risk management way to prevent that kind of thing from happening again. And I guess the reward for me was when, many years later, one of the key salesmen, who at one point later in my career became my boss, said to me at his retirement party that the thing that really differentiated the company in his mind from the competition and that became a winning advantage was having this kind of compliance or integrity DNA in our system, whereby customers in these difficult sectors trusted us over the competition. To hear the business person say that was the biggest possible reward I could have had for my efforts over those years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, most definitely. I mean, it would seem to me that that type of work would be a marriage made in heaven essentially. I mean, Japanese culture being as risk-averse as it is, the need for people looking out for every possible thing that could go wrong, it would seem that that would be a strong environment for these types of departments to really take hold. But from what I'm gathering, it's been developing over the course of time, but it surprises me to a certain extent that it wasn't as well developed early on, if that makes sense.

Well, I think there's a number of things that could be said to that. It's a really important point you're raising there. If you look at how business developed in Japan in the post-war period in particular, it was a big enough market where people could basically deal with one another based on trust without detailed contracts. There was this notion in the government of administrative guidance, and everybody just kind of follows what the government might guide. But as Japanese companies expanded overseas, I think they sometimes ran into trouble. And at the same time, they were very risk-averse, so when they met this trouble, they would back off and go completely the wrong way and not grow in the way they otherwise would. So I think it kind of cut both ways, and companies over time came to realize that there needed to be a balanced way to consider how to take risk and manage it, without throwing the baby away with the bath water, so to speak. And so I think that's where there's been an increasing role of the importance of a strategic legal player in the organization.

Essentially, smart risk-taking, basically, one would hope. Yeah. Okay, thank you for sharing that. I do have another question here. In researching this talk, I came across an interview in which you broke down the difference in role and responsibility between an in-house lawyer and a lawyer at a law firm. I'll be the first to admit I'm somebody who's not within legal affairs, this is not my area of expertise at all, but your answer in this interview was really interesting, and I thought it'd be great for listeners to hear it as well. Perhaps you could speak to that point.

Well, first of all, I don't want to say anything negative about the lives or careers of people in law firms, because so many of my classmates from law school have pursued excellent careers, and as an in-house lawyer, I need the expertise that I can find in the best law firm situation, so it's very much a symbiotic relationship. But to me, when I talk to people about coming in-house, which was traditionally not considered to be a desirable career from an elite law school background, I emphasize a few points. One of those points is what has really appealed to me most during the course of my career: the ability to be close to the decision-making, which again goes back to the definition we were talking about at the beginning. Often, a client will come to you in a law firm and only share with you what they think they have to share with you in order to minimize their legal cost, and that can be a very frustrating process. Often it can be done at the spur of the moment where they expect an answer tomorrow. And I can't say that I've never been guilty of doing that as the in-house lawyer, but that then makes the management of one's lifestyle in a service firm like a law firm, and this goes to some extent in public relations firms and accounting firms as well, much more difficult to manage. So I emphasize that though we work incredibly hard inside of a company in these roles, we do have much more visibility to our calendar and ultimately more control over our lives. And so I think those are some of the key differences that I've seen in law firms versus in-house positions over the years that has made it easier to attract people to these in-house positions despite different compensation structures.

Right, and also too, I think you just at the top of that alluded to a degree, that point of being involved in the decision-making process, there has to be a certain level of reward as well in that personal satisfaction where your voice is heard and then you're seeing a company take a particular stance or position on one particular issue and then seeing how that unfolds. Obviously, if it goes in the right way, there's going to be some satisfaction there, and even if it doesn't, you're learning and growing in different ways. I suppose there's a different degree of attachment, I guess, is what I'm trying to get at there.

Well, I think you're absolutely right. You own the issue for better or worse, and you may live with it for years, and you've got to deal with all the consequences from it. So I think it makes you take a really strong upfront sense of responsibility for it. And I've always said about lawyers, they should at least be in their position for three years, whatever their position is, because you do need to see what the consequences of what you did might be and then learn from those.

Well said. Well said. Okay, excellent. I do have another question here, and this is kind of within the context of culture, I guess. We'd already mentioned, you've mentioned working for an American firm, obviously GE, and then having a big portion of your career within Asia, within Japan, and for some Japanese corporations. So how would you define your roles within this context of culture? I'm sure there must have been some very different experiences. Perhaps in this position at GE, you're expected to do A, B, and C, in this exact same position say within any of the Japanese corporations you've been involved with, maybe those roles or expectations were slightly different. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

Well, much of it is cultural. Of course, the US is far and away the opposite extreme from Japan in some respects, being the most litigious country by far in the world. So I think the role of lawyers, at least in that respect, is long well understood, although I think this notion of a strategic General Counsel is even there relatively new. But that's one thing. And I think having aggressive enforcement by government regulators is another factor, and that government regulation extends globally. There's an American mindset that our US laws should apply everywhere, and that's a little bit unique. But there was a structural difference as well, which was my role in Japan or in Asia at GE for those many years was at the Asia or Japan level, so I was often on the receiving end of what were very established policies that somehow I was expected to implement in a very different cultural country. And so that was always a very interesting challenge as to how we could grow in Asia with the right policies that would then in turn shape what the GE global policies are.

I don't mean to put you on the spot, but is there a specific example that would come to mind of something like this, where say the office in the US, for example, saying we need this accomplished, and then you're taking this on and culturally speaking this is going to be a big lift here, and maybe there are ways that you did accomplish that or sometimes you just had to politely educate that the US office that this is probably not the best course of action or track perhaps?

Well, in many ways, in implementing an anti-bribery program, for example, in the end you may have to do these things and figure out how to do them in the right way under the law because the US law does apply globally. But how in those days, I think it was kind of thought that your third-party distributors and sales agents, if you were just telling them what they needed to do in their contract to keep you out of trouble, at least if you were doing that, you were going to be okay. But of course, the law says much more than that, which is that you've got to do your due diligence and make sure they are in fact not violating terms that are in those contracts. But how do you go from a low base to that highly desired base with a new policy that comes out dictating that overnight? So you've got to have a risk-prioritized way that is culturally sensitive, with training materials that basically explain to your sales staff, to your third-party distributors and sales agents, why we need to do this in places as remote as Indonesia, India, which was a huge challenge. But that's just one example of many. Going back to the question now, transitioning to Japanese companies and being in a kind of C-suite position, I was able to look at it from an entirely different perspective, which was to draw on that huge amount of material that a company like GE had put in place globally and kind of write on a blank slate what this program should look like in a modified way for a global Japanese company. And to really engage with people starting at senior most management, including the CEO, to help drive that down. Of course, that's a never-ending process, but there were simply not policies that were global in most of these areas that the companies would get into trouble on, so it was a completely different perspective. And then how do you marry that with the laws and regulations in the many other countries which are the subsidiaries of these Japanese companies? That's really been the excitement. Drawing on the US with its very extreme litigious, detailed case precedent culture, it's not exactly what you take lock, stock, and barrel and put it in a Japanese company, but it really provides a tremendous framework for where the world is moving toward overall. So that's been really valuable.

Was there initial resistance from the Japanese side towards this, like, 'Well, culturally speaking, this is not going to fit, it's not going to work'? Of course, you're trying to sell it and trying to say, 'Well, we're going to have to shift it or change it this way or that way to make it work, to make it fit.' But in terms of initial resistance, were they welcoming to it, like, 'This is great, this is what we need to do, this is what we should use as a base or model and then modify from there'? I'd be curious to hear that.

Well, I think another cultural difference in US and Japanese business organizations is, and I'm not saying that Americans don't want to do the right thing, but I think what Americans do is often governed by law and this very complex legal system that we have, whereas I think in Japan, there is, there are always exceptions, but a very strong natural sense of wanting to do the right thing. And it's often that they don't have the infrastructure behind them to identify what the risk is in the first place and to have materials to mitigate and avoid that risk. So it's not people making mistakes because for the most part they're out there deliberately drawing from the till or what have you, but that they really are walking into a situation where they don't realize they're doing the wrong thing. So what that's leading me to is, I think the advantage that a company like GE had was that you had tremendous infrastructure with the budget that goes around that to put in place the systems that would enable the risk mitigation that I'm talking about. So I think the hardest thing in Japanese companies has been not getting that initial understanding, because people understand when it's explained, but really how do we quantify that and monetize it and build that into the ongoing budget process? Because it, like any business endeavor, requires investment.

Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like a lot of education as well. Just listening to that explanation, I was just thinking that was probably a big, big part of your job in those days, and perhaps even right up until today.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, excellent. All right, well I do have another question here. To this point, admittedly we've been speaking a lot about the professional side of things, but I think the kind of transition over to the personal to a certain degree, I'd be curious about the impact of this profession on you personally. What has it offered you from a general life and living standpoint? Maybe we could start there, maybe some of the positive side or the benefits perhaps of the work.

Well, one thing that has always amazed me during my career is how many classmates and others who I know who are in the law are genuinely not happy with their roles or their lives. I hear that over and over again, not universally, and many people are very happy of course, but I hear enough of it that I sort of wonder what's behind it. And I must say that in my 30 years as an in-house counsel, there are the bad days and tough days and the wrong day, but I've always been happy that I've woken up in the morning excited about what the day ahead is. And always having a feeling that if I pick up any newspaper, and this was true both at GE and it's true at Panasonic because both of them are conglomerate structures, very highly diversified as you mentioned at the beginning in many industries, you can't read any article about business or about law without thinking about how does it apply to the work I'm doing or to the businesses I'm helping, which then leads into a whole public policy aspect as well. So on the positive side, I just have to say I've always been passionate and positive about my work, especially since I left the law firms that I was in for the first five or six months, though I had very good basic learning experiences there as well.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it sounds like that's probably fueled much of your success, that outlook, that way of examining your career perhaps, and connecting it up as far as reading the newspapers, understanding what your role is and how things are shifting and changing and how that's going to impact what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. And that's every day, there's a bit of challenge in that perhaps, but also excitement as well, I would assume, because there's new possibilities, there's new ways of going about things, analyzing things, so on and so forth. So yeah, I could see that.

Well, and it's that excitement and passion that I think ultimately also reinforce your ability to succeed when you're talking about tough subjects and investments that have to be made and things that may not be initially welcomed as suggestions. I think that excitement and passion are very important.

It's the fuel, essentially, right?

Right, right.

Yeah, okay, well said. Conversely, the negative side, I mean there's always two sides of the coin obviously. Has there been anything on that side that's kind of trickled down into your personal life or been a bit of a challenge at times? Perhaps the hours, travel, again the cultural dynamics, anything there?

Well, in a global job, Japan is probably one of the worst places in the world to be based from the perspective of time zone management and telephone calls and travel. So you've got to understand, I think in any global job you're going to have, based from Japan, calls around the clock. You can manage it to some extent and you try to accommodate other people's schedules and they try to accommodate yours, but that's always going to be a downside. As far as the traveling goes, I probably have more travel in my Lixel and Panasonic roles, being true global positions, compared to what I had at GE which were in Asia. And that sometimes has been tough. We've had the pandemic for the past two years, so that's gone completely the other direction, but I was fortunate because of the travel to have built up trust with stakeholders around the globe. I knew who the people were, and I think that makes the virtual world then a little bit easier to deal with. I do worry a little bit about people joining in the middle of this environment and not having that same background. I think the travel is a part of the job, given my love of culture and love of language, how to put it together, that that's been a real plus even though sometimes it's a bit much.

Excellent. Okay, I'm very good. Another question here, and something again I referenced when I introduced you: your years of involvement with the ACCJ, the American Chamber of Commerce Japan, and in 2013 you actually held the presidency. I'd be curious to know what spurred you to get involved on that side of things. I mean, it sounds as though you're quite busy just professionally speaking, working for the companies that you did, but taking on that role and responsibility, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Well, when I first joined GE, for the first six or seven years I was in the Medical Systems, now called Healthcare, business. And that, as you know, is a very highly regulated business with lots of government policy around it and issues related to how you can sell your products in any market, including Japan. So we had a lot of challenges as a foreign provider figuring out how to do things on an equal footing. So I got involved in the ACCJ early in the 1990s when I joined GE. It was a great opportunity to not only network but to actually put out papers and talk to government officials and work with industry to positively change the environment in a way that would make it easier to do business. And I came to realize that that was also fundamentally related to my skills as a lawyer, because in the end, a lawyer deals with laws, and those were the kinds of things that we were trying to influence and to shape. So as I got deeper into it and learned the issues that other companies were facing in other industries, and of course GE was a conglomerate with many different corporate interests, well, one thing led to the other. For better or worse, my company had already decided I was a Japan specialist, so I was not going back to the United States, and there were also personal considerations for that. And this was a way to grow in Japan, my business and my personal leadership skills, kind of in synergy with what I was doing on the business side. So it's a great organization, and I strongly recommend it to anybody who is thinking about how to further broaden and develop their career.

Yeah, yeah. Was there any particular moments or experiences, examples even, of things that have stood out or that do stand out even now in reflecting on that time?

Well, many, many things actually. But in the year that I was president, in 2013, I remember having a call from a gentleman in the US Trade Representative office in Washington one morning saying that the United States and Japan had agreed that Japan would participate equally in the Trans-Pacific Partnership process, which of course has gone not exactly anywhere since 2016. But that was just an incredible moment because at the time, we had been working on that. It was just the time that the Abe administration had come in with its Abenomics program, and there was lots of constructive dialogue about making changes that would make both American and Japanese products more competitive in each other's countries and the rest of Asia, and in a way that would hopefully bring China into the fold one day. But things have sort of taken a turn in another direction.

But they sure have. But yeah, I do recall as well, there was a lot of optimism around that, and there was a lot going on at that time. It was an exciting time, visible, highly exciting ways to be engaged with the business community and with the government here more broadly.

Yeah.

Okay, excellent. Well, I do have one more question here within this segment, and if I remiss not to bring this one up. Again, in researching for this, I came across an article, an online publication that is actually out in Japan, in which you and your husband Paul detail the origins of your relationship and formation of your family. And of course, it was a very beautiful piece, I might add. But I'm curious here, what compelled you to share such intimate stories and reflections?

Well, Paul and I had met when I was still working for a law firm in China back in 1988, and it was circumstances of the time that drew us both to Japan rather than my going back to New York with the law firm I was with. We both had some background in Japanese, and it was kind of unexpected that we would both end up developing our careers for 30 years and lives here in Japan after meeting in China, he being Chinese, me American. And I think in the early 1990s, it was still very early for people to be talking openly about their same-sex relationships. Most companies did not have policies protecting that status, there were certainly not laws protecting it, there were no immigration advantages to enable partners to move together. There still unfortunately really isn't that in Japan. But one thing led to the other, and the world started to change, and my company started to change. There were healthcare benefits for US employees, and I had to apply for those, so that was something I had to say. I also had to be able to explain why I very practically could not just pick up and take a position in the United States because I have a partner here and what is he going to do. So there are practical sides of it. But then I learned that as I started to come out to more and more people, I could be much more authentic in my responsibilities as a leader inside of the company, in talking more openly to my colleagues and to the people who work for me, and to be more credible as a person. And I think that was a very valuable lesson for me. And then I guess the last thing I would say about that is that when we finally made the decision to have children, and my first son was born in 2011, we had gotten married in California in 2008. It was just beyond the question of any doubt as to how open we could be, for the sake of the children as well as our family as a whole. We made a decision that we needed to be completely open. So I think all those things, some of them are practical, some of them are related to my leadership, and by the way, it's a never-ending process. You constantly find situations where you're still coming out to people who don't know.

Right, right. Well, how lovely though. Very well explained, of course. And also too, I would imagine the position that you were holding, how inspirational that was as well to others, seeing that. That had to have been part of it as well, I'm assuming, whether or not that's something you intended for or considered, but I'm sure that most definitely would have had an effect on others.

Well, thank you for saying that. That was what really got me to be more personally involved in the marriage equality effort and this ACCJ viewpoint that was ultimately put out on promoting that in Japan, which you alluded to at the beginning. And just then, in addition to that, feeling or being out there for people to see, and to do interviews like this, so that people can see there's a future in the professional world in whatever profession they're in, but they have to figure out themselves, but there's others out there hopefully they can go to for support and recognize that it's possible.

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you again for sharing that. I truly believe it is inspirational for a lot of people, and hopefully listeners as well for this program right now can take something away from that point that you just shared. So yeah, thank you again.

Thank you.

All right, well let's move into a new segment here, something called a Water Cooler Story. Basically, here I just ask guests to indulge listeners with a story relating to the profession, and yeah, I'm really anxious to hear what you've got for us, Larry.

Well, I think I actually maybe jumped the gun on it and described it in a misinterpretation of it earlier. But I mentioned the situation I had at GE where I really had endless years of discussion to put in place the right compliance infrastructure to mitigate that type of risk. And the proof was in the pudding, not just with that retirement story that I mentioned, but we actually had another raid by local police six years later after the first case, which was obviously scary to all of us. And the employees that were being questioned by the police, three nights in a row until the stroke of midnight, they were absolutely confident that they had done nothing wrong and could explain the policies that we had put in place. There was no more than a cup of coffee offered to these government officials when they had to visit the offices. And to hear them say that so confidently when we would debrief them was something that really made me feel great, good for the company. And in the end, thank you very much for your cooperation and move on. To see people who are not experts in the law but be able to explain things in such a convincing way to these authorities who were asking them these questions under pretty intense pressure, that was one of the water cooler stories I wanted to share. I'm sure if you give me a minute, I could come up with another one as well, but I jumped the gun.

Ah, no, no, no, no problem at all. Maybe really to put you on the spot a little bit here, I understand that your time within Panasonic is drawing to a close. Have there been any moments within that corporation that have stood out, most recently perhaps in the last year even, as you've reflected on your career as a whole? Maybe something from there you could go with.

So, I stepped down from my executive position on March 31st, remain a director until June. But the big change that happened on April 1st, we've really been working on for a couple of years, is this transformation to a holding company, operating company structure, where we've taken each of the business segments and put them into separate operating subsidiaries of the holding company. And how to structure that to give them more autonomy to become more competitive hopefully in each of their business segments, more profitable especially as we look at Chinese and Korean competition in many of these areas. But to do that in a way where the legal function, completely unlike when I joined Panasonic four years ago, has an equal seat at the table with finance and HR as the key governance function, starting at the holding company level with the CEO and then at each level below that, as something which is totally accepted by management within the company now. That makes it absolutely critical, I think, to make this holding company, operating company structure successful, because you need that governance overlay at the same time while you're delegating this kind of decision making. So to hear people talk about legal and the General Counsel and the people who report or reported to me in that way is a real sense of accomplishment.

Most definitely. Yeah, it kind of returns to that point of probably a lot of things that you were educating them on early on when you probably took that position, and then to hear them spouting these things back or amongst each other finally, how could that not be...?

It's a very iterative process. I've done a lot of learning and listening in that process to come up hopefully with the right governance system as well.

Yeah, well it sounds like you were quite successful in that endeavor. So good for you. All right, well thank you for sharing that, Larry. We are rounding the bend here into our last segment, actually our Crystal Ball segment. As the name implies, we're looking forward to the future, usually trends, prediction, so on and so forth. And I want to start with this here. Your position at Panasonic came about partly through this push of investors to do away with the previous position of Corporate Advisor, which to my understanding was largely symbolic in nature and held by past presidents. Ostensibly, the reason for this move of course was to bring corporate governance in line with international norms and also to introduce, as I think you said, outside voices essentially. Now here's the question: Do you see moves like this within Japan as far as large scale enterprise continuing, or do you think that this steadfast pull towards tradition and history is still continuing to impede reforms like this in other major corporations?

Well, I think it will continue. But I'd step back for a second. In terms of Panasonic bringing me into the company, I do think that was part of a broader corporate governance transformation that Panasonic's been working on for several years, but I think there was a specific need with respect to legal and compliance that was separate from that Corporate Advisor structure question as well. But there were many aspects to that. I think it will continue. In my own company, my successor, Miss Shotoku, has also been nominated to a board seat. I think there's a continuing recognition that the legal person, the General Counsel, should have a seat on the board along with the CFO and some of the other key leaders. So I think that's in our company. But if you look at the expectations of ESG investors and the areas of emerging risk that they're focused on, whether it's the China-US relationship and trade sanctions and trade controls, bribery, competition law, data privacy with new software-based business models, supply chain issues and the human rights questions around all of that, regulators are moving in to support stronger enforcement. You have customers who are putting these types of provisions in our contracts that say you've got to be responsible for these issues in your supply chain. The standard just gets higher and higher. So I don't think it's possible for companies that want to operate competitively globally to retreat. How fast they will be compelled to move forward in an environment where Japan itself doesn't necessarily enforce as many laws as strictly as are done overseas, but I think it's got to go in the continuing direction of better.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of my job to overthink things, I guess, but when I was just considering this question and understanding and being in Japan for nearly 20 years now, some would say at times the pace of change can be glacial for certain matters. But the way you just described it makes complete and clear sense. I think I've even alluded to this in the opening where things are changing globally, internationally, standards, norms, expectations. You're right, for this global economy and for Japanese corporations to remain competitive, they really don't have a choice in this matter. They have to.

Well, very small example, but just look at the pandemic over the last two years and how Japanese companies, mine included, transitioned so quickly to doing all types of meetings, including board meetings, virtually by Teams or Zoom or Webex or what have you. That is something, especially in Japan which values the personal relationships as much as it does, one would have never imagined happening so quickly. I think for those of us who are here a long time, we have long memories and we realize the difficulty of some things that have taken much longer to change than they should have. The marriage equality issue is something that comes to mind, but things do change here at the right moment if we keep pushing in the right direction.

Yeah, you're right. Okay, I'd like to close up with one final question here. Do you see any other compliance issues that are coming down the line perhaps to ensure the competitiveness of Japanese corporations? Perhaps you just answered that in your previous answer there, but is there anything else that you could speak to relating to this?

Well, I do think those are the big ones. There's what I call the old staples of competition law and anti-bribery. But I think the trade sanctions and trade controls issues, I mean certainly the Russia-Ukraine war adds to that, but it's already pre-existing with the relationship with China and the challenges of that with the United States. So that's going to be an increasing issue. And as I said, ESG stakeholders are really looking closely at supply chains in all their dimensions, so I think the compliance issues there are really important. And data privacy as we use more AI tools and every product line that you can think of is now becoming more digitally driven as a business model, and collection of data is just so incredibly important that that's something we've all got to watch and work on proactively as well.

Most definitely. Well said. All right, Larry, well I must say it's been a riveting talk and I've thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed all of this. The time has just flown, and I thank you immensely for your time and for joining the program today.

Well, thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks for the opportunity.

Yeah, thank you. Now, for those interested in learning more about Larry and his work, you can find and connect with him via LinkedIn. There will be a link for this in the show notes. And of course, if you liked today's show, please be sure to share. All that stuff helps. And of course, you can rate, review, and subscribe wherever you access your podcasts. And while you're at it, head on over to YouTube. We do have a channel there, Life As, where you can catch full episodes, video episodes of the conversations like we had today with Larry. And the interesting thing here is the first two to three minutes, four minutes perhaps, will have a slideshow of imagery related to the talk. So yeah, head on over there. If you do, please be sure to subscribe. And finally, don't forget to join us on the next episode of Life As, where we'll continue to explore and unearth the details of professions and the people behind them. I'm your host, Christopher Schoenwald. Until next time, stay curious about life and living.