Tuesday's Wall Street Journal featured a glowing piece on Howard Stringers, Sony's CEO. The article took the form of excerpts from Walt Mossberg's interview of Stringer at a recent conference on digitalization.
I have to say, from the piece, I like Stringer a lot. He seems to embody several great qualities in a leader. He seems both passionate, but deliberative as well. He has respect for his new company's strengths, but is wasting no time in remedying its weaknesses. He's not cowed by culture, nor language gaps. And he's not arrogant.
An acquaintance of mine from CBS had spoken glowingly of him there, when discussing his departure. She told me he also took a number of his best lieutenants with him to Sony. According to the article, he has also hired a key technology head from Apple, Tim Schaaff.
I like how Sir Howard appreciates Sony's vast product breadth, and finds strengths in it, as he also begins to pare back its excesses. He spoke eloquently about the new Sony Reader portable electronic book device. Stringer seems to share Steve Jobs' ability, in contrast to Bill Gates, to identify with his average customer, and passionately embrace a product he can "feel" is right.
From his remarks, I sense Stringer has the potential to fashion a turnaround at Sony by refocusing on successful exploitation of its classic strengths. By contrast, for instance, I think Gates and Microsoft are simply throwing money at new areas in which they have no particular advantage.
Sony isn't a member of the S&P500. I wish it were, because, based upon what I read this week, it could well become a good example of a firm on track to be consistently fundamentally strong and, then, consistently superior in its total returns to shareholders.
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