Management lessons through story telling-The Sony Walkman

Leading by intuition
The idea took shape when Ibuka came into Akio Morita’s office one day with one of the portable stereo tape recorders and a pair of standard-size headphones. He looked unhappy and complained about the weight of the system. Morita asked him what was on his mind and then he explained, “I like to listen to music, but I don’t want to disturb others. I can’t sit there by my stereo all day. This is my solution – I take the music with me. But it’s too heavy.”

The following is Morita’s account: “Ibuka’s complaint set me into motion. I ordered our engineers to take one of our reliable small cassette tape recorders we called Pressman, strip out the recording circuit and the speaker, and replace them with a stereo amplifier. I outlined the other details I wanted, which included very light-weight headphones that turned out to be one of the most difficult parts of the Walkman project.

Everybody gave me a hard time. It seemed as though nobody liked the idea. At one of our product planning meetings, one of the engineers said, “It sounds like a good idea, but will people, but it if it doesn’t have recording capability? I don’t think so.”

I said, “Millions of people have bought car stereo without recording capability and I think millions will buy this machine.”

Nobody openly laughed at me, but I didn’t seem to be convincing my own project team, although they reluctantly went along. I even dictated the selling price to suit a young person’s pocketbook, even before we made the first machine.

The tape recorder was a relatively expensive unit, selling for 49,000 yen in Japan, Morita wanted the first models of our new stereo experiment to retail for no more than thirty thousand yen. The accountants protested but Morita persisted. Morita told them he was confident about making the new product in very large numbers and the cost would come down as volume climbed. Morita chose the basic configuration of the Pressman because many parts for the Pressman were available worldwide at service centers, and Sony knew the unit was reliable. Therefore Sony could start out without worrying about any mechanical failure.

Morita continues his narrative: “In a short time the first experimental unit with new, miniature headphones was delivered to me, and I was delighted with the small size of it and the high-quality sound the headphones produced. In conventional stereo with large loudspeakers, most of the energy used to produce the sound is wasted, because only a fraction of it goes to the listeners’ ears. The rest of the sound vibrates off the walls and the windows. Our tiny unit needed only a small tricky of battery power to the amplifier to drive the tiny lightweight headphones. The fidelity that came through the small headphones was as good or better than I expected.

I thought we had produced a terrific item, and I was full of enthusiasm for it, but our marketing people were unenthusiastic. They said it wouldn’t sell, and it embarrassed me to be so excited about a product most others thought would be a dud. But I was so confident the product was viable that I said I would take personal responsibility for the project. I never had reason to regret it. The idea took hold and from the very beginning the Walkman was a runaway success.”

Adapted from “Made in Japan,” by Akio Morita