At age 74, Yoshiko Shinohara is a towering figure in Japanese business. She has created a wealth of job opportunities, including many for women, by founding the temporary-staffing agency Tempstaff and lobbying to strike down laws that stifled the temp industry. Tempstaff now has approximately 3,300 employees and is a public company. For the past nine years, Shinohara has been on Fortune’s list of the 50 most powerful women in global business. It all started, she told Harvard Business School’s Anthony J. Mayo and Mayuka Yamazaki, with a personal choice she made when she was young.
