Hello. I am Shuhei Akasaka, Public Relations Manager for the Seibu Lions.
Thanks to the support of the Lions fans, the team won their first game against the Nippon-Ham Fighters last night (June 25th) with a narrow 1-0 victory.
The head of public relations at the Lions selects which players who performed well in the game will be put on the stage for the hero interview, and yesterday three players were chosen. Among them, Shoya Makino was a player who had undergone a long rehabilitation from an injury and had been demoted to a development player (a position aiming to become a professional baseball player), but he continued to work hard without giving up.
As a result, he was re-registered as a controlled player yesterday, immediately put on the catcher in the starting lineup for the first team, led five pitchers and pitched a shutout.
It was impressive to see Makino, who was in tears on the stage, embraced by starting pitcher Yutaro Watanabe, who was in the same grade as him. Seeing scenes like this reminds us that deciding who to send up to the stage is not necessarily just about the results of the game, but also about the stories each individual player has.
Now, the theme of this article is “Similarities between crisis management public relations in the business and professional baseball sectors.”
The key words are “collecting, organizing, and utilizing information” and “being sincere both internally and externally.” In addition, it also includes the “principle of fairness” that I mentioned in my previous column.
Responding to a scandal 20 years ago became the formative experience of “crisis management”
My first experience with crisis management dates back to my time at Kokudo. On March 1, 2004, my fourth year at the company, there were many reporters in front of the Seibu Railway headquarters. The day before, the Kokudo ice hockey team had won the national championship, so I came to work thinking, “If we win, all these reporters will come.”
As I started clipping the media articles that were published as usual, I noticed the words “Seibu Railway suspected of providing benefits to corporate racketeers, Metropolitan Police Department questioning executives” on the front page of the Sankei Shimbun. The reporters were not gathered because the ice hockey team had won.
This led to a series of incidents, and Seibu Railway’s shares were delisted due to false securities statements and insider trading.
The Seibu Group was run by charismatic owners Yasujiro Tsutsumi and Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, and even at the time it had a history of nearly 100 years. Both men attracted attention at the time with their extraordinary talents, and the group was highly trusted by financial institutions.
Although Kokudo was positioned as the group’s business holding company, it was unlisted and, although it did a good job of promoting itself in a positive way, it tended to decline negative interviews.
However, we were suddenly faced with a crisis, and the lack of experience of myself and the organization itself was exposed. The media also reported on this incident, but there was little public information about Kokudo or the Seibu Group to begin with, and we did not receive satisfactory answers even when we inquired about it to the public relations department. This led to suspicions that “we were hiding something,” and the reports were given in a strong tone.
At the time, I was the youngest member of the Public Relations Department, so rather than responding to media interviews, I worked on the miscellaneous tasks that arose every day together with my fellow general affairs staff. However, I did my best to be of some help to my superiors and seniors.
Because the group also manages professional baseball, the articles were published everywhere, not just in general newspapers but also in sports newspapers and weekly magazines. I would leave work early to clip the pages, edit and dub the previous night’s TV news, and check the magazines, and before I knew it, it was time for the evening paper to arrive, and I would finally get to work in the evening. This continued every day.
At that time, I found myself completely unaware of the changes the Seibu Group had undergone since its founding to arrive at its current governance structure, the stock situation, the board of directors structure, financial statements, and how financial statements were published. Even though it was a non-listed company, I should have been able to explain it if I had taken an interest in the company I worked for and researched it. At that time, I realized the importance of collecting, organizing, and utilizing information.
If the PR department had organized the information and could lecture it to reporters, the reporters could write articles based on the information to some extent. Even if the company’s actions were unforgivable, at the very least, Kokudo PR would not have been perceived as “hiding something,” and a certain level of relationship could have been built.
Shuhei Akasaka (Director of Public Relations, Seibu Lions) Shuhei Akasaka (Director of Public Relations, Seibu Lions)
Shuhei Akasaka (Public Relations Manager, Seibu Lions)
Joined Kokudo in 2000, assigned to the Public Relations Office in 2004, and has since worked in both public relations and planning at various Seibu Group companies. In 2006, he was in charge of public relations in the Business Planning Department of Prince Hotels, and in 2009, he also served in charge of golf and skiing in the same department. In 2011, he joined the Public Relations Department of Seibu Holdings, and in 2018, he joined the Business Strategy Department of the Corporate Planning Headquarters. In 2019, he became the head of Seibu Lab (new business creation) at the same headquarters, and in 2023, he became the head of the Public Relations Department of the Seibu Lions.
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2024-06-26 03:08:45
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