Howard Stringer, CEO of Sony, was interviewed by Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.
Did anyone catch this? How did he come across?
Does anyone else think it is crazy that Stringer's family is in England, his home office is in NYC, and where he is most needed most is Tokyo? If I had anything to do with his schedule, I'd move him to Tokyo with his family and take out any appearances at movie premiers in Los Angeles- that's a waste of his time at the CEO level.
Carlos Ghosn lived in Tokyo when he was turning Nissan around. Stringer needs to do the same.
The company has 150,000 employees, $70 billion in revenue and products ranging from movies to music to all things electronic. Sony long defined the leading edge in gadgetry, transistor radios in the 1950s, Trinitron TVs in the 1960s and, in the 1970s, the revolutionary Walkman.
But if Sony had the market cornered for 25 years, it took Apple just months to steal it away.
Stringer admits that looking at one of Apple's iPods hurts, a major symbol of where Sony went off the tracks.
"There’s no question that the iPod was a wakeup call for Sony. And the answer is that Steve Jobs was smarter at software than we are," he says.
Stringer says Steve Jobs came up with the iPod and iTunes, a simple system for people to download music — while Sony, worried about its record company — wasted precious time trying to figure out how to keep people from stealing songs.
"We tried to have a secure device. And that was a myth," says Stringer. "And a mistake. Sad for the music company, mind you."
It’s not just the iPod. Samsung hurt them in flat screen TVs and, in videogames, Microsoft’s Xbox challenged the PlayStation.
Sir Howard Stringer: Sony's Savior? [cbsnews.com]
I just watched it on the DVR.
For those that follow Sony, there was nothing really new here.
Overall, it was a pretty shallow piece with very little research or insight. Stringer comes across as a good guy with a big job to do in an alien world.
The interview lets us see him as a real human being who likes to smile, talk, think, joke, and interact with other people. The show leaves the question of how he's doing or how much value he's bringing to Sony completely open (as will I for the purposes of this post).
Maybe they'll do one of those "when we first brought you this story..." follow-ups in a year's time.
I don't think going to movie premiers is a bad thing, as one hit movie can make or break the entire entertainment division. If traveling is his thing, then he better do it, since Sony is so massive. Like the Roman Empire...