position:plant manager

  • Brooke Harrington’s Capital Without Borders: An Excerpt - The Atlantic
    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/wealth-managers/499064
    La sociologie des riches vu à travers les yeux d’un gestionnaire de patrimoine.

    elite clients may ask wealth management professionals to undergo a contemporary version of the trials of Hercules. Another English practitioner who is nearing the end of a forty-year career in Hong Kong had a particularly impressive story of an impossible task set him by a client bent on testing his trustworthiness:

    I was phoned up from Osaka once, by a client who said, “I’m sitting across from Owagi-san, who speaks no English, but we are bowing to each other. He has just said to me through a translator that he needs a thousand sides of smoked salmon by Tuesday, and I’m relying on you to get them.” I said, “I’m your wealth manager, not your fishmonger.” And the client said, “Well, today you’re a fishmonger.” So I had to ring up a friend who knew the guy from Unilever who runs the smoked salmon plant in Scotland. And the plant manager made it happen. So I found out later that my client was testing me by setting me an impossible task—he told me that he was trying to see if I was really up to the kind of job he wanted me to do.

    The story is reminiscent in some ways of the tales of knightly quests, complete with seemingly insurmountable obstacles and abject humiliations (“today you’re a fishmonger”)—with a shipment of smoked salmon in place of the Holy Grail. The question behind the impossible task remains consistent: Are you truly devoted?

    Clients may also have a pragmatic reason for posing these tests: They allow the client to discover whether the wealth manager possesses the kind of social networks and influence necessary to provide extraordinary personal service. In this case, being “up to the kind of job” the client wanted depended not just on personal resolve but also on knowing the right people, in this case a friend with connections at Unilever. This is consistent with previous research showing that elite professionals serve their clients in part by acting as commercial “matchmakers,” facilitating opportunities that are not available publicly. For example, a study of 19th-century British lawyers showed how their familiarity with clients’ business dealings allowed them to create whole new industries, such as the country’s railroad system; the professionals established a kind of private market, accessible only to the upper crust of British society. Access to such opportunities hinged entirely on trust between clients and professionals, and the related perception of exclusivity. As the study concluded, “To avail oneself of opportunities, one has to be ‘one of us.’”

    Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent
    By Brooke Harrington
    Harvard University Press, 400pp, £22.95
    ISBN 9780674743809
    Published 29 September 2016

    Brooke Harrington - Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent - ValueWalk
    http://www.valuewalk.com/2016/09/brooke-harrington-capital-without-borders-wealth-managers-one-percent

    Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (Harvard University Press, 2016) is an innovative approach to addressing a problem that is even more pressing than income inequality—wealth inequality. Recognizing that the wealthy are “notoriously difficult to study,” Harrington, a sociologist, decided to focus instead on wealth managers. In some ways, however, they are even less accessible. As professionals, they are constrained by privacy considerations. Moreover, as a group they have come under attack for being “agents of money laundering and tax evasion” and are thus suspicious of outsiders. To overcome this barrier to access, Harrington trained for two years to gain certification by STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) as a wealth manager herself. Between 2008 and 2015 she conducted 65 interviews with wealth managers in 18 countries.

  • JAPON • L’ex-directeur de la centrale de Fukushima meurt d’un cancer | Courrier international
    http://www.courrierinternational.com/article/2013/07/09/l-ex-directeur-de-la-centrale-de-fukushima-meurt-d-un-cancer

    vu sur Rezo. Il FAUT rappeler que si tout n’a pas pété, c’est essentiellement à ce bonhomme qu’on le doit.

    En poste depuis 2010 à Daiichi, Masao Yoshida était très respecté par son équipe et avait confié au Mainichi Shimbun qu’il s’était préparé à mourir sur le site en réalisant à quel point la situation était critique. « M. Yoshida avait donné l’ordre de poursuivre le refroidissement des réacteurs par l’eau de mer, alors que le siège de Tepco avait ordonné l’interruption de cette opération depuis Tokyo », rappelle le Yomiuri Shimbun.

    Dans les descriptions de l’incident juste après, il y avait à ce sujet précis une description du coup de téléphone entre Yoshida et sa direction qualifiant le niveau des échanges quelque chose comme « musclé ».

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masao_Yoshida_(nuclear_engineer)

    On March 12, about 28 hours after the tsunami struck, TEPCO executives had ordered workers to start injecting seawater into Reactor No. 1. But 21 minutes later, they ordered Yoshida to suspend the operation. Yoshida chose to ignore the order. At 20:05 JST that night, the Japanese government again ordered seawater to be injected into Unit 1.[3]
    The week of June 7, 2011, TEPCO gave Yoshida a verbal reprimand for defying the order and not reporting it earlier.

    Article du 23/11/2012
    http://findognews.blogspot.fr/2012/11/give-thanks-for-masao-yoshida-fukushima.html

    Give thanks for Masao Yoshida, Fukushima plant manager, who ignored orders and prevented a meltdown

    Giving thanks to a rebel

    Luckily for him, Masao Yoshida, 55, was on watch. He was Fukushima’s plant manager, and he was among the 50-odd employees who stayed in the hot zone as radiation levels rose well above toxic levels. He was already a hero, although at that point only a foolish one. Yoshida knew that the reactor was vulnerable to seawater, and in the absence of emergency power or viable containment rods, that natural salty fluid was the only weapon he had. At the same time, he knew that the moment the reactor core came into contact with sea water, the plant itself would be effectively inoperable forever. His bosses at TEPCO ordered him to do nothing while they modeled the potential consequences of injecting seawater into the reactor core. An early attempt to flood part of the core was done improperly, and engineers worried that the contaminated seawater would simply flow back into the ocean. Also, by damaging the reactor this way, too much radioactive gas might be released.
    Yoshida and his workers figured out how to prevent backflow of seawater, but TEPCO still ordered him to wait on word from the prime minister. He ignored them, and on his order, decided to flood the bay. Problem: Getting seawater into the core was impossible, or almost impossible, because of the debris and damage done by the earthquake and the flood. Fukishima workers began to use abandoned firefighting equipment to literally pump water in, just gallons at a time, equivalent to a dropper of ink in a well.
    TEPCO told him to stop.

    He conveyed the orders to his crew, telling them simply to ignore what upper management was saying. He had cultivated enough loyalty among his engineers, and they obeyed his disobeyance.

    TEPCO then said in a press statement that said that there was little risk of a radioactive plume being released because the reactor core hadn’t been destroyed; in blunt terms, the radioactive particles were still contained. That was a lie. Yoshida and his crew were successful; they managed to corrode the core.

    ou encore (au milieu d’un récit long et détaillé)
    http://www.smh.com.au/world/heroes-of-the-meltdown-20130617-2ocz5.html

    The only one who didn’t appear confused at this point was Yoshida. He had just taken a call from Ichiro Takekuro, TEPCO’s government liaison, telling him to stop the seawater injections, which he had started.
    Showing the maverick streak that had endeared him to his colleagues inside the bunker, Yoshida disobeyed Takekuro’s order and continued injecting seawater into Reactor 1. As plant manager, Yoshida had the authority to ignore, overrule and defy head office. He was in the bunker. He was in control. He had hundreds of people’s lives in his hands. “Suspending the seawater could have meant death [for those at the plant],” he later revealed. Already, he felt they’d cheated death several times.
    (…)
    Nearly a year and a half after the meltdowns at Fukushima Dai-ichi, Masao Yoshida broke his silence. In a video message, the manager of the nuclear plant at the time of the disaster confessed he thought he and his fellow workers would never make it out alive. It was Yoshida’s only appearance since the meltdowns. He had preferred not to comment about what had happened until all the official investigations were completed and their reports were released. And the plant manager was also in hospital being treated for cancer of the oesophagus.
    In his message, Yoshida repeatedly praised the courage of his workers. “It was clear from the beginning we couldn’t run. Reactors 5 and 6 would have also melted down if people hadn’t stayed on site. My colleagues went out there again and again. The level of radiation on the ground was terrible, yet they gave everything they had. Pushing their physical limits, they would go out and risk their lives, come back in, then go out to do it again.”
    Yoshida is now regarded as a national hero by many. He was the man who ignored orders from his TEPCO superiors to stop pumping seawater into one of the stricken reactors, and he was the man who refused to be pushed about by pesky politicians like Naoto Kan. And he was a hero for staring death in the face to save his country from an even worse nuclear nightmare.
    The plant manager dismissed any suggestion, such as the one from the former prime minister, Kan, that an evacuation of Fukushima Dai-ichi was contemplated. At least, it wasn’t contemplated by him. “I never said to headquarters anything about pulling people out - it never occurred to me ... There was no way we were going to leave the plant,” Yoshida insisted.

    • C’est aussi la personne qui n’a rien trouvé à redire à diriger une centrale nucléaire sans protection face à l’océan et à avoir laissé les réservoirs de fuel de ses générateurs de secours vides.

      Bref, un bon collaborateur du Capital comme on aime, qui n’aura même pas le courage d’un minimum d’auto-critique.

    • Les générateurs de secours ? Il n’y en avait plus.
      (c’est dans le dernier lien)

      The diesel back-up generators had been submerged by the seawater that had flooded the basements of the turbine buildings and other generator sites. Electrical circuits had been shorted and generator fuel tanks washed away. There was no power source cooling the reactors. All that was left to stop Fukushima Dai-ichi’s nuclear fuel from overheating and disgorging radiation were banks of what are called “coping” batteries. They had enough charge to last just eight hours.

    • Ha....

      Le 29 décembre 2011, NHK World révèle que les générateurs de secours, tombés en panne lors de l’accident nucléaire de Fukushima, avaient déjà subi une inondation 20 ans plus tôt à la suite d’une fuite d’eau. À cette occasion, deux des générateurs de secours étaient tombés en panne. Malgré cet incident, TEPCO avait seulement fait installer des portes étanches mais n’avait cependant pas déménagé en hauteur ces générateurs30.