Akio Morita: LIE

 

"In fifty years' time we will have made the name Sony as famous as yours. So it's no, thank you." — declining a huge order from an American watchmaker that wanted to sell Sony's radios under its own label

"Curiosity is the key to creativity"

"I do not believe that any amount of market research could have told us that the Sony Walkman would be successful." 

In the early days, when Sony was still a small company, an American watch firm with a fifty-year pedigree offered to buy a hundred thousand transistor radios — on condition that they carry the buyer's name, not Sony's. Akio Morita (1921-1999) refused, with the sentence that deserves to stand as his epitaph: in fifty years, Sony would be as famous as they were. He was, on the numbers of that day, obviously wrong, and on the trajectory he could see, exactly right. This willingness to sacrifice the present's certain current profit to a projected future no one else could yet see, and then to drive the enterprise toward that future fits the LIE type.

In Sony itself, the reclusive Masaru Ibuka was the engineering inventor. Morita took the entire business apparatus of the enterprise. Contemporaries who knew both men drew the contrast: the quiet inventor and the "dynamic super-salesman, bold and outspoken." We have seen what the opposite arrangement looks like — Mary Kay Ash, who handed the management machinery to her son, and kept the relational and sensory sides of the business in her own hands. Morita is the inverse case.

In 1978 Ibuka, by then honorary chairman, had the engineers rig him a private toy — a small cassette player, playback only, for listening to music on flights. He handed it to Morita to try, and Morita knew instantly. What followed is the classic scene from a 2010'ies-era movie about the importance of brave innovators: the engineers said a tape recorder that could not record was ludicrous; the executives saw no demand; the retailers were skeptical; "everybody gave me a hard time," he recalled. He pushed it through on personal authority, and it sold some four hundred million units and changed how the human race listens to music. Morita's own verdict on the episode is typologically telling: no amount of market research could have predicted it. 

And the future-orientation in its creative-Ni "never-stop" (as opposed to, e.g. creative-Se "preserve it for the future") flavor consistently ran through everything he built. He drove Sony to make its own products obsolete before rivals could — an anti-static and anti-Si business philosophy, growth by perpetual self-cannibalization. He spent huge sums on unproven technologies, securing bank loans against products that did not yet exist. That's the biggest difference between a LIE and a LSI approach to conducting business (in a broader sense of the world, too) — despite some external LSI-ish "gravitas", Morita wasn't exactly a static structural order-keeper.

He pursued "convergence" — the linking of electronics, film, and music — decades before the word became fashionable, buying CBS Records and Columbia Pictures to position Sony for a merged future. And he absorbed the failures that this risk profile guarantees — Chromatron, the L-cassette, Betamax — without recrimination, codifying the principle that being overly stringent in punishing error deprives the company of everything that person might do later. Like the nippon.com page testifies, "Morita had intended to express his frank belief that management strategy where workers were laid off without remorse would never create a competitive business."

Wikipedia notices about his company's TR-63 radio: "Morita was an advocate for all the products made by Sony. However, since the radio was slightly too big to fit in a shirt pocket, Morita made his employees wear shirts with slightly larger pockets to give the radio a "pocket sized" appearance." This is quite a good illustration for LIE willingness to bend the truth a bit, if it's in business interest. The type lies the way it does everything else: efficiently, instrumentally, toward the result — and with a certain pride in the cleverness of the workaround. Yep, LIE scores slightly above average, overall, in mendacity, and when it does occur, it has this "pragmatic" flavor.

Morita might have had an EIE accent in that he was a flamboyant promoter — he demonstrated products personally, appeared in American Express commercials, skydived and scuba-dived in his sixties, socialized with Rockefellers and Bernsteins, and became, as "Mr. Sony," the most recognizable Japanese face in world business. But the showmanship was instrumental: it, his son later said, was something his father "had to act — it was never real." And while he did like to talk about creativity, and could be called creative himself, all this was always in service of efficiency and profit, rather than something valued in itself. In business sense, though, he was cocky from the start — his own word for his young self among the navy's senior engineers.