Sony : The Private Life [Hardcover]

John Nathan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sony's cofounders, Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita, met near the end of World War II. Ibuka was an engineer with a childlike love for gadgetry and technology; Morita, a pragmatic physicist who arranged to be away from his military unit on the day Japan surrendered, fearful that all officers would be ordered to commit ritual suicide. (He guessed correctly.) Together they founded Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Co., Ltd., the forerunner of Sony, in 1946, using loans from Morita's wealthy family for startup capital. But even that wasn't as simple as it seems. First, Morita had to be released from his obligation, as first-born son, to take over the family sake business. The very Japaneseness of that moment goes a long way toward illustrating the exotic charm of Sony: The Private Life.

John Nathan is a professor of Japanese culture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and speaks and understands the nuanced Japanese like a native. He was given extraordinary access to Sony employees, and found some of them telling him company secrets that had never been revealed to outsiders. (In international business, the electronics giant has traditionally been regarded as a black hole; information goes in, but it never comes out.) From these intimate revelations, he tells a story of a company that to Western observers always seemed like a bottom-line-oriented conglomerate. The reality, he writes, is that Sony has always operated via intense personal relationships and loyalties--in that sense, in a very Japanese way. Even the company's disastrous decision to buy Columbia Pictures came from top Sony executives' desire to honor Morita, who'd always wanted to own a movie studio. Although that decision ultimately cost Sony billions of dollars, it pleased the man who mattered. --Lou Schuler

From 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 absorbingAand even poignantAsections 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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (September 28, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395893275
• ISBN-13: 978-0395893272
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,154,567 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A touching, unforgetable book, February 2, 2000

By 

Ernest Kim "An Average Joe" (Hillsboro, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony : The Private Life (Hardcover)

While this is ostensibly a book about business (it is categorized as such), it is really a book about people and the complex personal and social relationships that were a part of Sony's rise from an unknown engineering company born out of the rubble of post WWII Japan to one of the largest and well recognized companies in the world.

Mr. Nathan does a remarkable job of providing the reader with a palpable feel for the personalities intimately involved in the Sony story, particularly those of the Japanese leaders who drove the birth and growth of Sony as a global power. This is something that is all too rare in business texts on Japanese corporations and makes the insights provided by this book all the more valuable. By the story's end we feel almost as though we know personally Masaru Ibuka, Akio Morita, and Norio Ohga, the men who lived and made Sony. What we come to realize is that in Japan, contrary to initial appearances, business is driven by social and personal considerations as least as much, if not moreso, than business considerations.

While this book will be valuable for anyone doing business in Japan or with a Japanese company, it's appeal is much broader than the executive suite. It's a story that will appeal to anyone who has dreamed of building something greater than themselves. As Nobuyuki Idei would say, the "Digital Dream Kids".

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful in every way, December 11, 1999

By 

Jay Tannenbaum (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sony : The Private Life (Hardcover)

There are many books that chronicle Industrial Design, but very few give even a glimpse behind the closed doors of one of Japan's "thousand-year companies." Dr. Nathan is truly an insider. His understanding of the subtle nuance of Japanese culture and how global business really works makes for great reading. I recommend it to anyone interested in building a company from scratch into the best-loved brand in the world. I read Sony: The Private Life in one sitting - the best business book I've ever read.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the company, but the people, September 4, 2003

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony: A Private Life (Paperback)

This book doesn't tell the story of the company SONY, but the career of the people who created and ran it: the Morita's, Ibuka, Ohga, Idei and some US officers - Schulhof, Yetnikoff.

The portraits are very favourable, nearly and sometimes really hagiographies (e.g. 'Yoshiko's genius as a hostess' p. 80)
For a more critical portrait of Akio Morita, see Ian Buruma's 'The Missionary and the Libertine'.

Sony is evidently a big success story, but it is also a tale of egos, ambitions, stress, clashes, strokes, heart attacks and fear of death (Akio Morita: I'll never die).

John Nathan gives us a good picture of the defeated Japan after WWII.
The Columbia saga is well told, but is better unravelled in Nancy Griffin's 'Hit and Run'.
The real story behind the loss of the crucial video battle is not revealed.

A good character study of the people who created a world company from scratch.