George Olcott

Biography

Dr. Olcott is Guest Professor at the Faculty of Commerce, Keio University. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation on the impact of foreign ownership and control on Japanese organizations at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge in 2005. He was Senior Fellow at the Judge Business School until 2013 and Project Professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo between 2010 and 2013.

After graduating from the University of Oxford with a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, he spent five years in Hong Kong and Japan working for Cathay Pacific Airways. After completing an MBA at INSEAD in France, he joined the UK merchant bank SG Warburg (now UBS Investment Bank). He spent fifteen years at Warburg, ten of which were in Tokyo. He also spent three years as CEO of UBS’s institutional asset management division in Japan. He left the bank in 2001 to commence his studies at Cambridge.

He joined the board of Nippon Sheet Glass in 2008 and the board of NKSJ Holdings in 2010. He retired from both boards in 2014 and is currently a board member of Kirin Holdings and the Audit & Supervisory board of Toyota Motor Corp. He has also served as an advisor to a number of leading Japanese companies. In the UK, he is a member of the boards of JP Morgan Japanese Investment Trust plc and BlueOptima Limited.

In addition to contributions to leading academic journals and newspapers, he wrote Conflict and Change: Foreign Ownership and the Japanese Firm, published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, with a Japanese version, Gaishi ga Kaeru Nihonteki Keiei, published by the Nihon Keizai Shimbun in July 2010.