But much like Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” – the first of his blockbuster trilogy that centers around the work of the fictional investigative journal, Millennium, peering into financial misdoings – the Olympus conflict wouldn’t have surfaced were it not for the work of a little known magazine in Tokyo. The Olympus boardroom drama centers around $1.4 billion in losses that company officials now admit were hidden from shareholders and regulators through shady accounting. Perhaps Stieg Larsson is the closer comparison. “Flying to New York to meet the FBI, references to organized crime, boardroom conflicts, character assassination – the whole thing has been a bizarre way to live.” “I thought I was coming to run a health care company … and a consumer electronics company, and I find myself in this John Grisham novel,” Michael Woodford said last week at the Tokyo Foreign Correspondent’s Club. When the ex-CEO of Olympus talked about the saga that had befallen the Japanese company, the story he spun was less Harvard Business Review and more Pulp Fiction.
