Category: Women In Business

Were it not for the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster, Misaki Tanaka’s destiny might have been different. But the catastrophe that devastated northeastern Japan in March of that year caused her to take stock of her life.

Tanaka, now 29, had just graduated from a Kyoto university when the magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake struck. It generated a towering tsunami that ravaged coastal areas of the Tohoku region, left more than 20,000 people dead or missing, and set off a nuclear disaster.

Tanaka began working for a major information technology company in Tokyo that developed video games. In her free time, she volunteered to assist disaster victims. This entailed clearing farmland of mounds of dead fish and debris washed ashore by the tsunami.

Struck by the yawning gap between her existence and the sense of helplessness that afflicted those in affected areas, Tanaka began wondering whether she was cut out for her line of work. Eventually, she quit the video game company.

She landed another job at a public interest corporation working to support disaster victims, which took her to Fukushima, site of the nuclear disaster. Afterwards, she returned to the corporation’s Tokyo office and worked on disaster preparedness exercises, which she found “tedious, boring and always the same.” She said that even as a child, “I never once found them interesting.”

Tanaka understood that disaster preparedness was hugely important, but her spirit was unmoved by evacuation drills that involved assembling at designated times and locales and then shuffling off to a simulated evacuation center.

With her background in information technology and a keen fashion sense, Tanaka began thinking about how to make disaster preparedness events more entertaining and get more young people involved. By the time the second anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami disaster rolled around, in 2013, she and other young people she had met through her reconstruction support efforts announced the formation of Bosai Girls (Disaster Preparedness Girls).

Tanaka’s decision to use the word “girls” in the name reflected the fact that women are particularly vulnerable in times of disaster. If she was to promote her vision of a fun and funky approach to disaster preparedness, Tanaka realized she needed to reach young women, who are often the catalyst for new trends. The group raised funds online and set up a website, developing and selling goods for national emergencies that were both useful and fashionable.

Among items the group developed were sturdy shoes that could be folded, boots for volunteers emblazoned with cute designs, and bags covered with 3-D hazard maps of Tokyo’s fashionable Shibuya district. Another item was a “misanga” friendship bracelet that doubled as dental floss and a washing line.

Tanaka’s next step was to inject some excitement into evacuation drills. She wanted to foster a sense of competitiveness that would make participants eager to accomplish their goals.

Drilsl were held in hip parts of Tokyo, such as Shibuya and Akihabara, where throngs of young people congregate. Participants use a designated smartphone app to reach as many evacuation centers and support stations as possible during a designated period, as a way to assess the difficulties that people might face in a natural disaster.

Unlike past evacuation exercises that were heavily scripted, the drills devised by Bosai Girls brought home the reality that people might have to fend for themselves in unfamiliar areas when disaster strikes. Having participants compete to rack up the most visits added a sense of play, similar to video games.

The group’s latest project, #beORANGE, aims at getting people to associate orange flags with approaching tsunami danger, much like a red traffic signal tells motorists to stop. The Nippon Foundation provided 25 million yen (USD $234,000) in subsidies for the #beORANGE project in fiscal 2016, and a further 20 million yen the following year.

“The foundation subsidizes many different organizations, but few develop into a national movement,” noted foundation member Eriko Munechika. “Bosai Girls has the means to reach a lot of people because it is asking the right question: ‘How do we reach young people?’”

To date, the group has distributed around 400 orange flags to at least 70 municipalities nationwide. At the same time, membership of Bosai Girls has risen to 130-plus, the majority of them women in their twenties.

Bosai Girls is now looking beyond disaster preparedness to tackle other areas of daily life that can be harrowing, such as bullying, stalking, prejudice against sexual minorities and intense pressure from family members and others for young women to marry.

“We want to continue facing off against ‘disasters’ that prevent us from leading happy lives,” Tanaka said. “We aim to pursue new solutions that match the needs of the younger generation.”

http://bosai-girl.com/

The elusive search for a drug against memory loss

Andrea Pfeifer and her company AC Immune are at the forefront of research for a drug against Alzheimer’s disease. While giant pharmaceutical companies have given up, she perseveres.

There is a long story and a short story to be told about Andrea Pfeifer. The short story goes like this: The 60-year-old businesswoman forgets nothing. She remembers every instruction she has given – until it has been fulfilled. Forgetting and not forgetting are central to her work: Pfeifer and her company AC Immune are fighting against Alzheimer’s disease, the biotech company is searching for a cure for memory loss. By 2020 it wants to have an effective therapy against the disease ready for distribution.

To understand the long story, one has to travel to Lausanne on the banks of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. At this time of year, fog envelops the city, icy rain washes the last patches of snow off the streets. During the weekend, Pfeifer was in the sun high above the clouds in Crans Montana, the alpine ski resort not far from Lausanne where the Alpine Ski World Cup for Women was taking place. She loves skiing, says the scientist of German origin. “But I would never launch myself down a slope the way these athletes do.” Much too risky.

In fact, Pfeifer herself has taken high risks of her own. With her company she is active in an area of research that has been waiting for a breakthrough for many years. Pfeifer is sitting in a meeting room in the Innovation Park of the Federal Technical University of Lausanne (EPLF), one of the leading research institutions in Europe. More than 160 startup and spin-off companies born out of research at the university have their offices here, including AC Immune.

Pfeifer founded the company 15 years ago. Before that, she was vice president of Nestle, the global food and beverage conglomerate. She was head of research, in charge of hundreds of employees – one of the top people at the company. She led the discovery of LC1, a joghurt that is reputed to regulate digestion. It became a global success, not least because of clever marketing. As a result, she was in contact with the press more than 200 times within a single year in Germany alone, Pfeifer said later.

But she gave up the comfortable position at Nestle to found her own business. She wanted to return to her roots in medical research. Pfeifer has a doctorate in pharmacology and worked for many years on cancer research at the National Institutes of Health in the United States.

From joghurt to Alzheimer’s – a huge change. Alzheimer’s disease is scary. It is estimated that in Switzerland alone 150’000 people suffer from various forms of dementia, of which Alzheimer’s is the most common. Until 2040, this figure is likely to double to 300’000 because Swiss society is ageing rapidly.

For decades, the big pharmaceutical companies have been looking for drugs against the disease. Several of them have now given up. Recently, US-giant Pfizer announced that it is withdrawing from development of drugs against Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s. It wanted to concentrate on areas of research that promised better success and commercial prospects. Eli Lilly, another US pharmaceutical giant, announced in January that its latest tests with a drug against Alzheimer’s had ended in failure.

But AC Immune is continuing with its research. One of its drugs, on which the company is cooperating with Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical multinational, is in the final stages of clinical testing. For these drugs to be effective, they need to be used much earlier than has been common practice until now, Pfeifer says. Ideally even before the disease manifests itself. Which is why the company is also working on methods for an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. “This year, we want to test a new method for detecting harmful deposits in the brain”, Pfeifer says.

Pfeifer has a vision: In seven to ten years it should be possible to predict whether a 40-year-old is likely to develop Alzheimer’s. If there is an increased risk, people would be treated with drugs which prevent the outbreak of the disease.

Still, the attention her company gets despite the fact that it has not yet produced a marketable drug is significant. There’s hardly a business or scientific publication that has not talked to Pfeifer. That has to do with the subject of its research: Alzheimer’s is scary. But it also has to do with Pfeifer herself, who does not fear publicity. She presents herself as a woman who knows that she stands out. Wearing a black leather jacket and a colourful top, she forms a marked contrast to the grey scientists in grey rooms which surround her. Casually, she talks about meeting Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, and asking him how he became so successful at public presentation of his products. “His answer: practice, practice, practice. He practiced his presentations thousands of times.” Pfeifer does the same. She leaves nothing to chance.

Whether her vision can be realised is still unclear. Certainly, AC Immune could do with some good news. In 2016, it listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange in New York and raised 70,5 Million Dollars. But since then, the stock has lost a third of its value. According to Pfeifer, that is at least partly due to the expiry of the lock-up period during which new investors are prevented from selling their stock. “And we have to publicise our brand more effectively in the United States”, says Pfeifer.

In addition, setbacks suffered by other companies in Alzheimer’s research have affected the value of AC Immune. In 2016, the company suffered a loss of one million Swiss Francs (1,06 million US Dollars), in the first nine months of 2017 the loss mounted to 25 million Francs (26,6 million Dollars). But she is not worried about that. “Our financial results are not that important. They will remain irregular until our drugs come to market”, she says.

As a woman at the head of a company, Pfeifer automatically stands out. In Switzerland, only 12 percent of top management is made up of women. “In my career, I have often been in situations where I was the only woman”, Pfeifer says. It was not easy, and she is convinced that young women today need to be assisted to reach the top. “Above all, they need one thing: positive role models.” She herself never had such a role model – and initially did not want to be one. “It went against the grain for me to be declared a role model”, she says. “But now I have realised how important that is for other women.” One of the women working for once said that she believes in her own prospect of a successful career because she can follow Pfeifer’s example.

Pfeifer is married, has no children. But she is convinced that even with a family she would have made it to the top. And that this should also be possible for women working in her company. “The times when women had to make a choice between work and family are over.”

But her decisiveness on the issue probably ignores some of its complexity. Not all women have bosses who want to promote a balance between work and family life. And Pfeifer herself had to make many sacrifices during the course of her career. “I work hard, travel a lot. My social life has suffered as a result.” But her family always had top priority, she says: “I always have time for them.”

When she was 11 years old, Pfeifer’s mother fell seriously ill. When she was 17, her father was also struck by disease. “During practically my whole childhood I was surrounded by chronic illness”, she says. “It was really scary.” Even as a teenager, existential questions had to be answered: “What did that mean for my future? Would I be able to study? How would I afford it if something happened to my parents?” At the time, she could not heal her parents. But one day, she might be able to help other people. That would be a fitting end to a long story.

www.acimmune.com

When Hurricane Sandy hit the Eastern seaboard in 2012, it left more than 8 million businesses and households without electricity. Business costs in New Jersey alone totalled $8.3 billion. At the time, Adapt Ready co-founder Shruthi Rao was working as a sustainability consultant in New York. When she presented her sustainability recommendations to C-level executives after the hurricane, they seemed more interested in how extreme weather events were affecting their company’s bottom line, and what they could do about it.

This sense of urgency was new. Usually, Rao had noticed, companies would hire sustainability consultants to get a PR boost, but wouldn’t implement many of their recommendations. But, she realized, “If you start making the link of how these extreme events have impacts specifically on that individual or company, things will start moving forward.”

The Allianz Risk Barometer 2017 ranks natural catastrophes as one of its top ten global business risks—they were responsible for US$175 billion in economic losses in 2016. Many companies have suppliers located in areas prone to severe weather or natural catastrophes, yet are unprepared when the impacts of business interruptions halfway across the world trickle up to them.

By 2012, the hot topics in software development were Big Data and machine learning, in which a computer processes enormous amounts of data and continually improves (or “learns”) how to make decisions. “All these cutting edge technologies were being used to build products and sell to consumers,” Rao said. “Very little—if at all—was used to address some of the biggest challenges facing mankind, or even business issues.”

Rao co-founded Adapt Ready in 2013 with software developer Sandeep Chandur, now a six-person startup with operations in London and New York. The company has developed a risk intelligence platform built on Big Data analytics and artificial intelligence that signals how critical risk factors around the world, such as extreme weather or political events, could impact a business, using purely external data. While Adapt Ready’s platform has many potential applications, it currently serves the needs of insurance carriers who want to better understand their clients’ risk exposure and also tap into market opportunities based on new insights.

Adapt Ready had the perfect case study last September, when Hurricane Harvey slammed into Texas. A flooded chemical plant’s stockpile of organic peroxides caught fire and exploded, sending plumes of noxious smoke into the air. Within 48 hours, Adapt Ready was able to map and provide a quick search of all of the chemical factories in the region, what chemicals they were manufacturing, and their environmental violations. They sent this information to insurance companies who, if they had known more details prior to selling the policies, could have priced their products accordingly and/or forced the plant owners to come up with better emergency plans.

This pilot project won Adapt Ready several more, including assessing the risk profile for an insurer whose client has suppliers in China’s flood-prone Pearl River Delta. “They’re really focused on resilience and adaptability, which is a great place to be, business wise,” said Judith Curry, president of Climate Forecast Applications Network and Professor Emeritus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. “In the face of possible worse weather and climate outcomes, adapting to the current weather and climate challenges is going to make companies a lot more prepared for whatever the future climate might throw at them.”

Adapt Ready can also help address the insurance protection gap in developing countries: vulnerable industries that lack insurance and can’t survive serious business disruptions. ”It’s good for business to identify these insurance gaps, but it’s also good for these vulnerable communities, to help protect them from being affected by these events,” Rao said.

Rao is a product of the global economy herself, having worked as a software engineer in her home town of Bangalore, India, before moving to the U.S. to work and earn an MBA.

In 2010, she became a Fellow of the Environmental Defense Fund, working to develop an energy efficiency plan for Akamai Technologies. She was only supposed to analyze Akamai’s data centers and electricity usage, but ended up designing an innovative pricing strategy, which was recognized at the 2011 Uptime Institute Awards and garnered her press in The Boston Globe.

Curious about the Globe’s sustainability, she asked for a tour of its facilities, and subsequently cold-mailed the CFO her recommendations. It was a hard sell at a time when newspapers were financially insecure. “Everyone at the time thought sustainability was a cost center,” Rao said. But she was so convincing, the CFO hired her as a sustainability consultant. She then moved to New York City to continue consulting for businesses before co-founding Adapt Ready.

Last year Adapt Ready beat out startups and large companies alike to win two notable awards: Risk-Modelling Technology of the Year at the Insurance Times Tech & Innovation Awards and Excellence in Technology – Service Provider at the Insurance Times Awards.

Adapt Ready is currently pitching for funding to build a more robust version of its software, but Rao has run into two challenges. First, there is the startup industry’s fetishization of the elevator pitch. “Whenever you’re working on a real problem, something complex that has far-reaching benefits, it’s really hard to communicate what you are doing in 30 seconds,” she said. “The startup world is more friendly to simplistic messages.”

She has also experienced the startup world’s well-documented bias against women. In one meeting, an investor interrupted Rao at least eight times, then expressed concern that her co-founder wouldn’t be able to handle both the technology and sales sides by himself. Never mind that Rao would be leading the charge on sales.

Rao has found that many investors seek CEOs with aggressive attributes. “It is this mindset that subconsciously directs investments towards male founders,” she said. “If there is anything that sells, it’s not aggressiveness, it’s authenticity.”