Best of India Contest @bestofindia | My favorite industrialist/entrepreneur |Akio Morita

Akio Morita: Made Japan Great Again, The Visionary Who Inspired Jeff Bezos & Steve Jobs

Akio Morita is a relatively unknown name in the modern business and industrialist landscape, after his passing in 1999, few have spoken about his legacy of perhaps one of, if not the greatest visionary of the 20th century, but mention the company he founded - Sony and everybody knows what you are talking about. He is my favorite industrialist/visionary because unlike most entrepreneurs in his class, his vision did not only contain his company but an entire nation, he is the reason why made in Japan is superior to made in China or almost every other country in the world for that matter. In 1999, when he died, a poll conducted listed Sony as the No. 1 brand name among US consumers, superseding American companies like General Electric (GE) and Coca-Cola. But how did he take a tiny radio repair shop and turn it into one of the most innovative global electronics and entertainment giants?

Follow Your Own Path - “Passion Over Money”
Born into a 14th generation family of sake brewers, from an early age he was expected to take over the family business as the eldest son, as had been done for the past 14 generations. His father would begin taking him to board meetings at just 10 years old to prepare him to inherit the company. But young Akio wasn’t interested in continuing the family business, instead, he was a young techy kid often messing around with any electronics he could get his hands on, he was far more interested in Math and Physics than he was in the family business. Eventually, he would finish school, during this period he would make two decisions that would begin a recurring theme in his life of defiance or the unrelenting pursuit of doing what he saw was the right thing, first, he somehow convinced his father to let his younger brother take over the business and secondly despite his father’s strong recommendation that he studied economics at university, he chose to study Physics instead - choosing passion over money and defining his path to success, a decision that will become instrumental in the success of Sony and ironically make him one of the wealthiest men in the world.

Big Vision
After graduation, he would go serve in the Japanese army during world war 2, until one faithful day when he got word of the most shocking news he had ever received, the U.S. had dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He knew that Japan would soon surrender and admit defeat. In that very moment he had a deep realization - here lay his believed homeland in ruins, economic disaster, and patriotic devastation. What further concerned him was that it was a nuclear bomb, not any bomb but a nuclear bomb, this concept among the Japanese military was thought to be at least two decades away, and there it was right before their eyes being dropped in their country. It was with this backdrop that he would utter one of the greatest company missions ever, that he was to start a company that would “make Japan known for quality”. Post world war 2 Japan was in economic ruins and patriotism was at an all-time low to say his company mission was next to impossible is a bit of an understatement.

Start, Fail & Don’t Give Up
Soon he would co-found Sony just a month after Japan’s surrender in the war, it was Originally known as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo KK (the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation). Their first office was in the basement of a department store that had extensive bomb damage that occurred during the war. They were originally an electronics repair company that barely made any profit, at some point they had huge sums of rice and needed a way to sell it, so as an electronics company does they decided to start manufacturing and selling rice cookers, but the product was a colossal failure, it always produced either overcooked or undercooked rice and soon after they stopped manufacturing it. Morita would later say he learned valuable lessons from that period.

Frugality
Akio would make frequent trip’s to the U.S. to keep up to date with the latest innovations, during this period because of currency restrictions and the little money he had, he would often stay in cheap hotels and would wash his clothes in the sink to save money - a frugal mentality that was critical to the way he would run Sony successfully.

Overcoming Challenges
Eventually, Sony would be made aware of the invention of the transistor in America on one of Akio’s trips to the U.S., they soon partnered with a company that had a transistor patent, the partnership cost them an initial fee of $25 000 - a sum that almost bankrupted the young company but Akio was adamant that this transistor would allow them to build a small portable home radio that could make the company a lot of money, most people in the company didn’t buy into this vision and thought it was doomed to fail. Also, there were problems - the patent they had access to was to an inferior design of the transistor, which had many faults that made it hard to use in the manufacturing of radios, this is where his persistent decision to go against his father’s advice by studying Physics would pay off massively, He used his technical knowledge to experiment with different chemicals and configurations until he found a way to make the transistors efficient enough to be used to make a small portable radio. But this wasn’t the end of their problems, Japan was too poor during that period for people to be able to afford to buy a home radio, so they had to figure out a way to sell it to an American market, but an American company by the name Regency had managed to beat them to market by releasing their portable radio a few months earlier, as a result, they would struggle to get distributors to sell their radio.

Akio was close to giving up until Bulova ordered 100 000 units of the radio and offered to distribute them in the U.S. Everyone in the company was overjoyed as the order was worth more than twice the value of Sony at the time, but the agreement stipulated that this would be done under the name Bulova and not Sony’s - making Sony a mere, supplier. Akio refused because this went against his vision, he wanted to make Japan known for quality not service American products to make them appear as high quality. So he went against almost the entire company and refused to sign the agreement. After a while they found a distributor who met all their conditions and agreed to distribute it, their radio was far better than Regency’s - whose radio was inferior because their transistors weren’t as efficient as Sony’s ones, it was often faulty and had low volume so consumers opted, to buy Sony’s home radio instead, the product was a smashing success, this would be the early sign of Sony’s realization of its mission to make Japan known for quality.

Selling Is Everything
Akio cleverly marketed the radio as pocket-sized to make a compelling marketing campaign, but the radio didn’t fit in a regular pocket size, so he ordered specially tailored t-shirts that had bigger pockets for the entire sales team to wear, they would slot the radio in their pockets as they were selling it to customers as a pocket-sized radio. On one of his trips to America, he also realized that no one knew how to pronounce Sony’s original name “Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo KK” properly, so he decided it need to be changed to an easy-to-pronounce and catchy name, to achieve this he combined to words, 1. The word “Sonus” which is Latin for sound and 2. “Sonny”, which was a popular slang word in the 50s to call a boy in America. This truly makes me realize how unique he was, most companies are either foundered by a great product mind or marketer like Steve Jobs or a technical genius like Elon Musk very few have a combination of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, let alone a single person who embodies both traits.

Make Some History Along The Journey
In another massive step to realizing Sony’s mission, Akio Morita made history as Sony became the first Japanese company to list on the New York Stock Exchange In 1961.

The Makings Of A Visionary & Not Giving Up On Your Vision
Soon after, in his dogged persistence to make quality Japanese products for the American market he moved to the United States, while there he observed how Americans loved music, they would listen to it in their cars and even carry around large stereos to listen to music in public places like the beach or the park. What particularly caught his attention was how this was particularly observable in American teens.

He began to imagine a device that was more personal to the user and allowed people to listen to music anywhere and anytime they wanted. So he and his team at Sony begin designing an even smaller version of the portable radio, they had previously built, he added the ability to slot in cassettes of music you wanted to listen to and had earphones so only you could hear the music playing, but after doing market research for the product the Sony research team concluded that no one would buy the product and there were fears that earphones could cause loss of hearing after extensive use.

They recommended that the project be scrapped and not be made commercially available. Akio’s response - to push through with the product staying true to his vision just like he had done with the portable radio in the past, he knew Sony needed to take risks to build a truly revolutionary product. The product was called the Sony Walkman, a product that would go on to sell over 350 million units. Its technology was ahead of its time, it was nearly two years before duplicate products entered the market by that time, Sony's reputation and brand recognition had soared globally. The Walkman announced the arrival of Sony, changing the world’s perception of Japanese products. He would later be quoted saying “Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it. Don’t do market research.” and also “We plan to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want. The public does not know what is possible, but we do.” Most will credit this quote to Steve Jobs. But this was a statement made by Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony, years before Jobs. Another similarity between Jobs and Morita is - remember how the Sony Home Radio was marketed as a pocket radio, well the marketing campaign behind the Home Radio and the idea behind the Walkman as a personal portable device would be the inspiration of the iPod and its tagline “a 1000 songs in your pocket.” Some could say that Akio Morita is the Orignal Steve Jobs.

A Vision That Contained An Entire Nation & The Whole World
Akio Morita is my favorite Industrialist/visionary becomes he embodies just about the closest thing you can get to the” perfect” entrepreneur, overcoming extraordinary odds and obstacles like starting in a basement, facing failures, and having to push through with his vision regardless of what people thought. A marketing and creative genius that allowed him to crack the American consumer electronics market which is one of the toughest markets in the world, and to add to that a technical genius that he used to invent the products he was selling. But my favorite part is his vision, Jeff Bezos in his quest to build what he calls earth’s most customer-centric company originally got the philosophy from Morita and his unrelenting pursuit to build the highest quality products possible. I think that the Job of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs is not to amass the biggest fortune in the cemetery rather, it is to push the needle of innovation forward, in doing so increasing the quality of life that people experience and embodying the ideals of service to the masses and to craft a mission as crazy as making the world a better place. Few have done do it so well as Morita, whose company mission was to make Japan known for quality, a mission that not only encompassed his employees but also an entire nation but ultimately as with all leaders of the industry - it encompassed the whole world. Morita by increasing the standard of Japanese goods and global technology as a whole, he was the raindrop that contained the ocean, a man whose vision to take post-war Japan to one of the highest quality manufacturers of cutting edge technologies, and as entrepreneurs, we ought to strive to include in our visions the various countries we come from and ultimately the whole world.

Fun Fact: He was knighted by the British Royal Family