An Interview with Outside Directors (Isao Endo)

Sompo Holdings is right in the middle of unprecedented efforts to realize a “theme park for the security, health, and wellbeing of customers.” The Company is daring to depart from past successes and received ideas to adopt fresh perspectives and ideas in the pursuit of transformation.
At a pace rarely seen in a company of its magnitude, the Company is tackling numerous reforms and challenges. This rapidity and a “body clock” that is synchronized to an era of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) are surely testaments to the new competitive strength that Sompo Holdings is acquiring.
Nonetheless, the transformation has just begun. In establishing a new business model, the Company will no doubt face many difficulties and trials.
However, precisely such difficulties and trials will strengthen employees, thereby fostering future leaders of Sompo Holdings. The greatest product of transformation will be personnel who open the way to the future by focusing on the logic of customers, markets, and competitiveness rather than inward-looking logic.
In creating its future, the Company faces a myriad of management tasks, such as taking on new business domains and building an entirely novel platform, not to mention further evolving GembaPower^* to accomplish the first two tasks. As it proceeds, the management team must not lose sight of the big picture or attempt to please everybody.
I look forward to each employee actively participating in the transformation as the Company unites to create a “theme park.”

• Gemba-Power is the autonomous problem-finding and problem-solving capability of gemba, which can be loosely translated from Japanese as staff on the front lines.