Akio Morita The Sony man who put Japan on the corporate map f all the men behind the cavalcade of Japan's astonishing business success stories, one entrepreneur is responsible for putting his country on the world's corporate map. He is physicist Akio Morita, who came from a family of Nagoya sake brewers. Helped by the technical wizardry of fellow scientist Masaru Ibuka, Morita turned $375 and space in a bombed-out department store into an icon of corporate success and Japanese innovation. Morita and Ibuka started in 1946 with a conventional name, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, and a bulky, unattractive product, the tape recorder. Their mission was to marry advanced technological concepts to the needs of potential customers, but postwar Japan's consumers could little afford electronic gadgetry, so Morita decided to test the success of export-led growth. "I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the U.S. market," Morita told TIME in 1971, "and it had to be something different, something that nobody else was making." That something, of course, was the transistor radio, and behind the company's new name, Sony (from the Latin sonus, sound), it revolutionized the consumer electronics business. After the 1955 radio came the miniature televisions and the Trinitrons and the videocassette recorder. Then the Walkman arrived, a device of stunning ubiquity, followed by the Watchman. The latest Sony device is a computer-game software machine named PlayStation. If Ibuka's technological genius made Sony's advanced products marvelously simple, it was Morita who defined the concepts that made the Sony logo universal. Morita was a marketing whiz with few equals, whose secret was to straddle the cultures of the Occident and the Orient. After establishing his commercial stamp on the world, he became a global sage, using his stature to weigh in on the endless U.S.-Japan trade dispute. When Japanese exports were beginning to drive trade imbalances through the roof, Morita urged American business schools to heed the lessons of Japan and disregard the Wall Street -- driven, quick-profit, hire-and-fire culture. In the 1990s, as Japan's economy fell into a deep recession, he urged Japanese business to be more open and flexible -- to mimic, in effect, the West. On the tennis court one morning in 1993, Morita had a brain hemorrhage. Today, at 75, he lives in Hawaii. Sony will be a monument to his genius long after he has passed from the scene. | CONTENT |