#102 Akio Morita (Sony)

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like the Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories, and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer. But if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th.
40 years ago, a small group gathered in a burned out department store building in the war-devastated downtown Tokyo. Their purpose was to found a new company, and their optimistic goal was to develop the technologies that would help rebuild Japan's economy.
In this early gathering was a young engineer, Akio Morita, then just 25 years old.
Today, that company is one of the most powerful and respected multinational corporations in the world, Sony, and Akio Morita is its outspoken chairman.
The Sony story is one of consistently high-quality merchandise and phenomenally successful marketing strategies masterminded by Morita, who realized he would have to create the markets for Sony's unprecedented products.
Morita's striking departure from the traditional Japanese business practice of making decisions by committee led to the spectacular success of the Sony Walkman, which was his own idea.
And perceiving that Sony's future would be intimately tied to that of the United States, Morita decided to found a US subsidiary, Sony America, and he took the highly unusual step of moving his entire family to New York during its establishment.
From his global perspective, and as a friend and admirer of the US., Morita candidly discusses the differences, between Japanese and American management practices, the often stormy trade relations between Japan and the West, the real reasons behind the hollowing out of American industry, and the role of technology in preserving the future of mankind.
All right, so that is an excerpt from the book that I read this week, and the one I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is Made in Japan, Akio Morita and Sony. And it was written by Akio Morita, and Edwin Reingold and Mitsuko Shimura.
Okay, so that excerpt I just read talks about the founding of the company comes right after World War II. Tokyo has been devastated by not only the atomic bombs dropped in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but there was a ton of firebombing done all over Japan. And so I wanna spend some time, I think that's one of the most remarkable elements to Akio and Sony's story. So I wanna spend some time describing what that environment was like. Okay, so this is gonna be Akio as a young person dealing with the war. And he's in the Navy at the time. He says, I was having lunch with my Navy colleagues when the incredible news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima arrived. I understood what the bomb was and what it meant to Japan. He says he had a better understanding of other people because he studied physics before the bombing.
I understood what the bomb was and what it meant to Japan and to me. The future had never been more uncertain. Japan had never lost a war, and only a young man could be optimistic. Yet I had confidence in myself and in my future even then. I was 24
Okay, so that's one of the first personality traits I want to bring to your attention. Akio was, he had the utmost confidence in himself, even when at times he shouldn't have had. And a lot of people even call him cocky. You're going to see a lot of parallels between Akio and Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs actually met Akio at the very beginning. If you studied 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. I had seen the terrible results of conventional firebombing. I was in Tokyo when the incendiary bombs whipped up a firestorm that killed 100,000 people in just a few hours. Parts of all of Japan's major industrial cities were charred wastelands in 1945 Depressing heaps of blackened remains were the homes of millions of Japanese. And again, I think that's one of the most remarkable parts of this entire story is that he's gonna start one of the greatest companies of all time out of this kind of environment. So he says, when I first heard of the atomic attack on Hiroshima, it struck me that American industrial might was greater than we realized. It was simply overwhelming. 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.