Made in Japan

Akio Morita co-founded Sony with Masaru Ibuka in 1946 and wrote this memoir with Edwin Reingold and Mitsuko Shimomura at the height of the company's success. It covers the company's founding in the ruins of Tokyo, its product decisions, and Morita's account of the differences between Japanese and American business practice.

The product history is the strongest material. Morita describes licensing the transistor from Western Electric over the objections of the Japanese trade ministry, the pocket radio, the Trinitron colour television tube, the Betamax videocassette format and its defeat by VHS, and the Walkman, which he insisted on against internal opposition and market research showing no demand for a tape player without recording capability. He explains his decision to build Sony's own American sales organisation rather than sell through distributors, and to list Sony shares in New York.

The second half sets out Morita's views on management and on the trade conflict of the 1980s. He argues that Japanese firms plan on longer horizons because their shareholders and lenders permit it, that lifetime employment makes labour a fixed cost and therefore makes training worthwhile, and that American executives are financially rather than operationally trained. His criticisms of American short-termism were widely quoted at the time and read differently after Japan's subsequent decades. The book is a chief executive's account and does not examine Sony's failures with any rigour.