#102 Akio Morita (Sony)

Highlights

• 2024-11-12 12:10 Steve Jobs actually met a Kio at the very beginning. If you study the early days of Apple, Steve said that he wanted Apple to be the Sony of computers. And so that’s one trait they share. And I’ll talk a little bit more about what Steve Jobs said about Sony later on. All right, back to the book.

• 2024-11-12 12:09 I, for one, should have been prepared for it. In fact, as a boy in high school, I had seen a film of the construction of the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, and was thrilled by the concept of this gigantic project. Japan had no integrated manufacturing like that at the time. So Japan’s devastated. They just lost their first war in their entire history. And yet here we see the unwavering confidence of Akiyo. He says, I don’t mind saying that even then, as a young man, I felt that somehow I had a role to play in that future. I didn’t know how big a role would turn out to be.

• 2024-11-12 12:08 That was Kyo’s destiny before Sony. And so, as such, his dad, from a very young age, took Akio to work with him. He’d sit in on meetings even from the age of like 10, 12, 13, he’d be in all these meetings. They’d be reviewing numbers, and Akio would talk about, like, after the meetings were over and after he was essentially shadowing his dad, he’d have to think for a long time and try to interpret what the adults were talking about. And I think that is really important that Aquio, later in the life, says he’s a big fan of the total immersion theory, and I think that has something to do with how his dad just kind know, brought him in here.

• 2024-11-12 12:08 You’re not going to understand everything, but I’m going to constantly keep you at the very edge of your capabilities. It’s a very uncomfortable place, but it’s a place where probably all of our growth comes from. So I think it was very smart. So I’m going to cover a couple of things that he learned from the family business. Some traits that his family taught him that he kept his whole life. Tenacity, perseverance, and optimism, he says. This ancestor of mine had the eagerness to try something new. So they were in the Saki business, and there’s ebbs and flows to any business, and so they realize they have to diversify. He says. The ancestor of mine had the eagerness to try something new and the courage and strength not to give up if a single project failed.

• 2024-11-12 08:23 And I think one easy way to figure out how you to get an enjoyable life is just listen to your passions. Like, what do you do for fun?

• 2024-11-12 08:24 Now, okay, everybody knows that happened, right? His response was fascinating to me. Listen to what he says. I was shocked.

• 2024-11-12 12:06 Like, if you’re competing with companies that are more technology spirited, you’re going to lose. And this is not a new idea. This week, if you happen to use Twitter, if you want to follow Founders podcast on Twitter, every so often I just tweet out old ideas from books I’ve covered in the past. And this week I tweeted one out from Andrew Carney, because he talks about, like, he would invest heavily in the latest technology of his day when he’s building the factories, right, for steel production. And a lot of the old timers in the business were like, you’re wasting money. This is foolish. And so what he realized, this is the lesson that Andrew Carnegie came away with, which I think Akio understood in matters of life and death, and then later in matters of commercial interest in business, Sony. But essentially, Andrew Carnegie would tell us in this one excerpt that you need to invest in technology. The savings compound, it gives you an advantage over slower moving competitors and can be the difference between profit and loss, in Andrew’s case, and in the japanese american war, in between life and death.

• 2024-11-12 08:26 He said that we could pave the way for grand peace for all generations to come, but we had to do it by enduring the uniurable and suffering what was insufferable.

• 2024-11-12 08:30 On a trip to Japan in the early 1980s, Jobs asked Sony chairman Aquio Marita why everyone in his company factories were wearing uniforms. And this is a quote from jobs. He says he looked very ashamed and told me after the war, no one had any clothes.

• 2024-11-12 08:48 But they apparently judged, mistakenly, that there was no future in this business and gave it up.

• 2024-11-12 08:49 And so he like, and give me an idea about, like, in the early days, this reputation was so well known that Sony printed made in Japan as small as possible.

• 2024-11-12 12:07 He believed the public doesn’t actually know what is possible and that we do. Meaning Sony. Then he talks about the idea of the Walkman. And I just referenced that they sold over 400 million units sold. And then another note I left myself, it says, this was very much like Steve Jobs in the beginning when our track record for success was not established.

• 2024-11-12 12:07 So if you’re able to arrive and use your own reasoning and trust your own judgment, you’re going to have a huge advantage over people that are Just going to wait and copy what other companies do, right? And we made a lot of money having the market to ourselves. This gave them a huge advantage at the very beginning of the company.

• 2024-11-12 08:55 And this is one of the best sentences in the book. The accountants protested, but I persisted.

• 2024-11-12 08:59 We would have to put the Belova name on the radios. That stopped me. I had vowed that we would not be an original equipment maker for other companies.

• 2024-11-12 09:06 We invited him to be a paid critic even when he was still in school. His ideas were very challenging.

• 2024-11-12 12:08 So this is my Sony. American president was reluctant to spend the money. He said, if we spent a lot on this promotion and if he could not bring in enough sales, we would lose money. I told him over and over again, you must also consider the return that comes in five or ten years, not just the immediate return. So he says, that night I went to bed troubled. I couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning until I could stand it no more. In the middle of the night, I grabbed the phone and called Harvey. That’s the president or manager, he was in a meeting in New York. I got him out and yelled at him, if you’re not going to spend a million or $2million,oh,thisistheBetamexcampaign.Ifyo{u}^{\prime }renotgoingtospendamillionor$2 million in the Betamax campaign in the next two months, I will fire you. I had never said anything like that and he had never heard me sounding like that. It made an impression and I felt better. He spent the money. But I discovered later what they actually did.

• 2024-11-12 09:13 So I like this idea the way akiyo would educate customers about a new product. It was actually inspired by this japanese tradition of namawashi.

• 2024-11-12 12:20 We have racked our brains and made detailed studies and experiments to decide just what is the exact and precise temperature for a soldering iron in each particular application.

• 2024-11-12 12:32 So he says Japan creates more engineers and less lawyers. This is comparing and contrasting Japan and America. Japan is more cooperative of government.

• 2024-11-13 10:15 In Japan, the founder and CEO must resign if there’s shame brought to the company.

• 2024-11-13 10:15 And this is much less important in Japan or less worrisome, because the management of a company is more collective, so one person can leave. It’s not the end. Japan optimizes for long term investment over short term profits. Japan is less hierarchical. He gives an example of this

• 2024-11-13 10:15 We air condition our factories before our offices. America does a reverse. The most important thing for Japan, for a japanese company, is continued employment and improvement of workers. America, it’s the profit of shareholders. Japan believes any type of work is honorable.

• 2024-11-13 10:15 They won’t look down on specific jobs. He says Americans are like, they turn their nose up and they think all work. Japanese believes work is honorable in itself.

• 2024-11-13 10:17 We learned, once again the meaning of Montanai when the oil crisis came. But we also learned how to apply the principles that underlying the expression. And today, with a much expanded economy, we use less crude oil, coal and natural gas than we did in 1973. Because we have learned how to be efficient. So he’s saying, this has been in our culture for a while.

• 2024-11-13 10:17 We had to do it because Japan lacks a lot of natural resources. We rely on outside countries to produce it for that. And so in times of struggle, we get really good and really efficient, and then when we don’t have times of struggle, we still maintain that advantage. Right? So that’s the basic idea.

• 2024-11-13 10:17 In 1973, every maker of home appliances went to work to cut power consumption. And in fact, they competed with each other to see who could produce products using the least power.