The Economist posted a really great excerpt about Akio Morita (1921-1999), who personified the integration of Japanese industry into the global community from the 1960s to the end of the century. Founder and creator of Sony, he moved his family to the United States in 1963 in order to better understand the American consumer and make Sony a truly global brand—a brave move for a man from a then still insular society. He, more than anyone, put Japanese industry on the map.
As a young man Morita had been expected to go into the family’s 300-year-old sake business. But after service in the Japanese navy in the second world war he set up a small electronics company, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, along with a friend from the navy, Masaru Ibuka. Ibuka was to be the engineering genius behind the brand which Morita created.
In the 1950s the company produced a small transistor radio, which was its breakthrough product. The transistor had been invented in America, but Morita had bought a licence from Bell Laboratories to produce it in Japan. By the end of the decade the company was exporting its production to America and Europe. In 1958 the company changed its name. Morita and Ibuka are said to have trawled dictionaries for weeks before coming up with the word Sonus, the Latin for sound, which they modified to Sony because, it is said, “sony boys” is Japanese for whizz kids. Three years later it became the first Japanese company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The transistor radio was followed by transistor televisions and videotape recorders. But music was the company’s first focus, and Morita, taken by the fact that young people liked listening to music wherever they went, persuaded Sony (with virtually no supporting market research and against the wishes of many colleagues) to come out in 1980 with what became known as the Sony Walkman. It was a phenomenal worldwide success and turned Sony into a truly household name everywhere. In 1998 it was declared the number one consumer brand in America, ahead of Coca-Cola and Marlboro cigarettes, the more usual chart toppers. Morita would have seen that as the natural outcome of his famous view of globalisation—“think globally, act locally”. In America Sony was American. Only in Japan was it Japanese.
Morita continued to work and play ferociously (he loved water-skiing, tennis and scuba diving), and was due to become chairman of the keidanran, Japan’s powerful but deeply conservative association of big industrialists. It would have been a remarkable appointment for a man who had dragged himself and his corporation into the rapidly globalising world, but on the day his appointment was due to be announced he had a stroke (at the age of 72, in the early morning, while on the tennis court). From then until his death he remained in a wheelchair.
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This profile is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on more than 50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers past and present and over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.
