Overview
From its inauspicious beginnings amid Tokyo's bomb-scarred ruins to its role as the world's chief purveyor of electronics and mass culture, Sony's story is one of the signal fables of our age. In SONY: THE PRIVATE LIFE, John Nathan, a preeminent expert on Japanese culture, dissects this fable, pulling the veil from one of the world's most successful and secretive corporations. He uncovers persuasive evidence that Sony's biggest triumphs, from color TV to CDs, and most calamitous failures, like the Betamax debacle and the vexed takeover of Columbia Pictures, stem from the web of intense relationships that have always characterized its top ranks. Nathan traces this emotional web as no other writer has or could, by drawing on his unmatched expertise in Japanese culture and his unique, unlimited access to Sony's inner sanctum. With a novelist's skill - honed by translating the works of Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe - Nathan etches incisive portraits of the company's famously enigmatic cofounder, Akio Morita; its patrician, autocratic CEO, Norio Ohga; and its edgy new leader, Nobuyuki Idei, who already has brought wrenching changes to Sony. Nathan's exploration of the Sony empire also reveals how it invented color TV as we know it and used bold marketing techniques to best the inferior yet dominant American competition; why Sony ignored the conventional wisdom of the time to enter a groundbreaking partnership with archrival Philips to perfect the CD; how Sony manages to prosper despite Japan's economic malaise; and what innovations and strategies it plans for the new century. With authority and wit, Nathan dispels the myths that surround Sony and crafts unparalleled corporate drama. Sony: The Private Life is at once an engrossing chronicle of astounding entrepreneurship and a poignant account of loyalty's consequences.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Readers should be thankful that the most thorough history of Sony yet written comes from a writer steeped in Japanese culture rather than in business. Nathan, a professor of Japanese cultural studies at UC-Santa Barbara, gives a human dimension to the Japanese electronics giant, especially to its cofounders, Masaru Ibuka (the dreamer) and Akio Morita (the pragmatist), who, according to Ibuka's son, were linked by a bond of friendship and collegiality that made them "closer than lovers." Nathan had the full cooperation of Sony, including access to top officials and archives. Yet this is no puff-piece, but rather a fascinating account of how Sony succeeded despite such setbacks as the failure of Betamax and the disastrous $4.7 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures. At the center of the story are Ibuka and Morita, who strove to make Sony accepted and respected beyond Japan, especially in the U.S. Some of the most absorbing--and even poignant--sections concern the cultural divide between Japan and America. Nathan focuses on the interpersonal relationships among the company's leaders to examine what made the company tick. In addition to the interplay between Ibuka and Morita, Nathan documents the rise of Norio Ohga as the successor to the cofounders and also devotes a considerable amount of time to the relationship between Ohga and Mickey Schulhof, the highest-ranking American Sony officer before he was fired by the current Sony president Nobuyuki Idei. By mixing interviews with Sony executives with his own insights, Nathan provides readers with a thorough and entertaining history of the company that rose out of the ashes of WWII to embody Japan's postwar resurrection. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
Nathan, a professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara and an Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, received open access from the Sony Corporation for this history. He traces the company from its beginnings at the end of World War II to the present, providing an intimate, meticulously detailed account of how upper management made its decisions. Profiles of major players like founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka, members of the inner circle such as Mickey Schulof and Harvey Schein, and present chairman Norio Ohga and president Nobuyuki Idei give the reader an understanding of the motivations behind Sony Corporation's successful innovations, like the Walkman and compact-disc technology, and failures, like the Betamax and the purchase of Columbia Pictures. Nathan also provides ample insight into how the Japanese do business. A good choice for large public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/99.]--Steven J. Mayover, Free Lib. of Philadelphia Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.From The Critics
I still remember my exhilaration when Sony's tiny, matte-black "Pixy" audio system arrived in my small, tatami-covered room in Japan one January afternoon in the late 1980s. The look and feel of the stereo was perfect for my teenage scheme to make the place look like a Manhattan studio. Ten years later, the stereo rests on the wood floor of my apartment in California, but continues to entertain me day and night.Sony's ability to manufacture the hippest new products, from the Walkman to the new Glasstron head-mounted computer screen, is only part of the story in Sony: The Private Life. Author, Japan scholar and Emmy Award-winning filmmaker John Nathan documents intimate corporate dramas that might have remained hidden from an American lacking his language proficiency and understanding of often-misinterpreted Japanese culture and business practices.
Contrary to popular belief, many Japanese are actually quite frank among themselves, although most outsiders only see the public face of formality and aversion to embarrassment. It's a tribute to Nathan that he was able to get Sony's execs to reveal the world of intrigue among cofounders Masao Ibuka and Akio Morita, as well as their successors.
Nathan recreates such historic public events as the unveiling of Sony's breakthrough Trinitron color TV technology and its $6 billion acquisition of Columbia Pictures in 1989, which came amid a parade of Japanese corporate takeovers. But he also reveals such private episodes as cofounder Masaru Ibuka's troubles in his first marriage.
People who have lived in both Japan and America are sure to identify with the stories about Sony America. The author details how Harvey Schein, whom Morita recruited from CBS Records to be Sony's first American employee, failed to learn the very Japanese, emotion-based way of making decisions, and instead perpetuated an unsentimental, often abrasive American-style business culture based on logic alone. When Schein bruised egos, it terrified Japanese executives, although his self-described "hard-ass" management style often helped to bring delinquent customers in line.
Nathan also describes Schein's ultimately unsuccessful bid to change Sony's pricing structure after discovering that some divisions were losing money in the U.S. He concluded that the problem lay in product pricing originating in Tokyo, where corporate taxes were much higher than in the States. Schein then argued that Sony should sell products at a higher price in Japan to save corporate taxes and diminish profit margins, and at a lower price in the U.S. to save customs duties and increase profits. His plan fell apart when he met with resistance in Japan. His Japanese counterpart refused to implement Schein's scheme, maintaining that decreasing profits at the parent company to pass on savings to Sony America was "out of the question"; the company's credibility with Japanese banks was contingent on its high profitability there.
Sony's painful effort to create a truly global culture within its family of businesses reached a crossroads when current chairman and former CEO Norio Ohga selected someone from the new generation Nobuyuki Idei to succeed him as president and CEO. Idei was a surprise choice to many in Tokyo, who regarded him as a nontechnical "heretic" in Sony's corporate culture. The son of an affluent, globe-trotting economics professor, Idei studied in Europe and managed Sony's European operation for six years, acting on his own initiative and growing increasingly distant from headquarters.
Idei is presented as a man who comfortably digests huge helpings of such disparate economic theories as Nicholas Negroponte's "world of bits," Claude Levi-Strauss' "semantic borders" and Michael Porter's "value chains." He is also someone who struggles to balance his vision of new media with Sony's traditional practices.
Idei is now preparing Sony for what he calls "the network-centric era," Nathan writes. As the first step, last April he realigned Sony's 10 electronics companies into three new business divisions: the home network company, the personal IT network company, and the core technology and network company. He then relocated the units away from corporate headquarters, gave each its own R&D lab, and set up an independent board and management committee.
Although it might be natural for Sony to "engineer a discontinuity of the company's 50-year history" to face the challenges of the new economy, writes Nathan, it's unclear what that will mean for its visionary cofounders' painstakingly crafted global mentality. In the aftermath of Morita's death Oct. 3, the Japanese business press declared the end of Sony as we've know it. The new Sony that Nathan so skillfully documents can now fully emerge.
Michiyo Yamada