Sir Howard Stringer not afraid of playing hard but can weave subtle magic!

[City17]

 

A scant 48 hours earlier, Sony's British-born president was parading on stage, grinning his Hollywood schmoozer's grin and declaring that a belligerent management reshuffle was “the most fun I've had in six months”.

At 1.30am, crammed into the hard-seated wooden booth of a basement Irish pub in Tokyo and swigging tepid stout, Sir Howard Stringer's commentary is markedly less jolly. And the vocabulary — mildly edited — is more bar-room than boardroom.

“The guy is so bloody incompetent!” he roars. “Useless! He's doing absolutely bloody nothing out there and they still haven't got rid of him.”

The target of Sir Howard's wrath is not, for once, some obstructive, underperforming layer of Sony management but Carlos Tevez - the supposedly gifted Manchester United and Argentina striker whose header has just flown hideously wide of the mark.

The image on the pub's huge TV flicks to the face of Sir Alex Ferguson, also looking poisonously disappointed by Tevez's missed goal. Sir Howard shakes his head sympathetically. It is a silent management moment for two knights, each in charge of a testy squad of foreigners: mutual frustration separated by 7,000 miles.

Part of Sir Howard's Sunday night irritation is born of raw fatigue. The final of the Carling Cup, many miles and time-zones away in Wembley, has dragged tediously into overtime. The match is grinding towards a penalty shoot-out, chronic jetlag is tugging and he is being interviewed by Japan's Nikkei business newspaper in a few hours' time. It has also, he admits, been a horrible, disruptive week at work.

“People are wrong when they say I can only do this because I'm a foreigner. I can do it because I'm experienced but that doesn't make it any easier or more pleasant,” he says.

Watching Manchester United into the small hours is evidently worth the exhaustion, though. Sir Howard is passionate about sport and has made sure that his nomadic lifestyle — remorseless commuting between Sony's Tokyo and New York headquarters — is shaped to accommodate that. Hardest, of course, are stretches in Japan, where he spends more than half of each month away from family and where the time difference guarantees that Premiership football, European Championship matches and his beloved Welsh rugby are all alarmingly late-night affairs.

The time-zone challenge of last week's Champions League match between Manchester United and Porto was particularly inconvenient, forcing the peripatetic president out of his bed at 4am to “watch” scrolling live internet commentary of the game as he bashed out e-mails to New York on a laptop.

On taking over as the head of Sony in 2005, Sir Howard quickly identified the need to establish a friendly local pub in Japan: a home from home, serving decent beer and prepared to open its doors at a Welshman's whim.

Sony's March management reshuffle, which involved the signal promotion of four “young stars” and a fairly undisguised demotion of old guard management, was the culmination of many months' internal diplomacy and planning - months that have, in any case, been monstrously bad for any Japanese consumer electronics maker.

Toshiba issued a profits warning yesterday and NEC Electronics may be forced into a defensive merger to survive the extreme misery for semiconductor makers. Panasonic is forecasting some of the widest losses in its long history. Sony itself is rumbling towards a loss for the full year that ended on March 31 and Japanese business sentiment is at lows not seen since the “oil shock” days of the 1970s.

Glancing away from Man U's clash with Tottenham, Sir Howard manages to be upbeat. When the management changes were announced, the analysts and the press seemed to be giving his boardroom tornado the benefit of the doubt but he has, he says warily, seen goodwill vanish before.

The scrappy clash on the screen is punctuated by yet another Stringer rant against Tevez — a tirade cut short by the bleep-bleep of an incoming text message from Sony's chief legal counsel in New York. Sir Howard thumbs a message back to her, explaining that he is watching football.

“When a manager uses a word like ‘teamwork', everybody says ‘yeah, yeah',” he explains, “but the selection of the right people is many times more critical and complicated in a Japanese company than anyone outside one could ever expect. These are organisations where there are people who, without your realising until it's too late, each have their pocket vetoes.”

There is wrath and disappointment seething beneath that comment. Sir Howard's leadership battle at Sony has always been waged on a punishing three fronts — with industrial competitors such as Apple and Samsung, with the sheer pace of global technological advance and with the corporate inertia that has robbed Sony of its agility.

Mounting an aggressive attack on the third problem, he suggests, is the only way to ensure Sony survives the other two.

The duty of the newly installed team of managers, he says, will be to spread the word throughout Sony that the company's future will be in the hands of younger executives. Old Sony, says Sir Howard, never made young people into serious players quickly enough — “madness, when you consider that software engineers are basically young guys”.

And the timing is critical. The global financial crisis and the consumer spending drought that has emerged from it are as much ripe opportunities as heart-stopping threat — a chance to persuade people stationed throughout Sony's sprawling tangle of businesses that the new world is truly different.

“Almost everything I've done has happened because of a crisis,” he says, “I took over in a crisis. We have moved very quickly this week, no doubt about it but the next question is whether we can continue quickly enough. Can we make a company that is very heavy, more nimble? One problem is that even when you know there is resistance, it is hard to identify.”

Sir Howard has often spoken, too, of the “Shirley Temple” effect — the idea that lightweight, upbeat movies will tend to do well in a recession as families seek out sources of cheap entertainment.

The smashed records at US box offices this year seem to confirm his theory but he is even more excited by the extraordinary success of Sony Pictures' own film Paul Blart: Mall Cop. “Terrible reviews but it's going to do $135million at the box office,” he says, “It's likeable in a depressing environment.”

On the TV screen, the camera lands on Ryan Giggs, sitting on the reserves bench. “Send the Welshman in to save the day!” says Sir Howard. He pauses. “And get Tevez off!”

Meanwhile, the practical miseries of steering Sony through a worldwide slump are manifold — many analysts have suggested that the next few months could test Sir Howard's leadership to breaking point. The biggest and most obvious horror is the blow to sales of hardware and the way in which a freakishly strong yen, mountainous stock inventories and the collapse of leading retailers such as Circuit City in the US have warped the economics of the business.

It is most noticeable, he says, with the PlayStation 3 console — a device which he had hoped would spearhead Sony's efforts to blend the hardware and content businesses in a networked environment.

“The big problem is that we have been handicapped by the hardware costs and they have made the PS3 look rather sad against the Wii. The PS3 is an extraordinary machine and we have not been able to realise those qualities.

“We have been in this phase where the more we sell, the more money we lose but we are beginning to pass that. The energy of this machine and its relationship with the content business will get better.”

But a second, less visible challenge posed by the crisis is the direct threat to innovation itself — not, he argues, because Sony has a problem coming up with ideas but because the environment is precisely wrong for turning them into hit products. New technologies require consumers to buy them quickly and in large numbers, or they die on the shelves.

Sony's pioneering organic electroluminescent television is a prime example. “I need a few more breakthroughs in cost. Sony makes the world's thinnest TV and the one with the best picture, but if it's $1,000 more than people are going to spend in a recession, I have no advantage. People accuse us of not having the innovation. That's nonsense but unless you get the cost down, these things never make it,” he says.

All conversation stops as the match drags into the inevitable penalty shoot-out, which Manchester wins convincingly. Tevez's explosive goal passes without comment.

 

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Well that was a nice read...  I mostly agree with him.