FG to take over at Sony?!

[Taro Toporific]

New Sony chief looks to go after money-losing operations
Japan Times, June 23



Rots of Ruck, Sir Howard.

[Charles]

Raspberry jam?!?! Is this guy serious?

[homesweethome]

It's not raspberries, its sour grapes.

When all else fails, call in the gaijin mercenaries to do the dirty work. They might be well compensated, but if things don't work out as expected (to completely turn around a lazy but competent mega company in 18 months or less) just blame it on the lack of their understanding of the 'Japanese way.'

I hope he get's lots of stock options!

[emperor]

September 21, 2005 11:53 PM PDT
Sony to lay off 10,000
Sony Corp. announced a companywide restructuring that will result in the loss of 10,000 jobs, the closure of 11 plants and the end of its existing network system, the company said on Thursday.

The world's second- largest consumer electronics maker said it expects to save $1.8 billion in the process as it refocuses on its refocuses its efforts on electronics, televisions, digital imaging, DVD recorders and portable audio. Of the 10,000 in job cuts, the company said it will slash 4,000 jobs in Japan and 6,000 jobs elsewhere.

Chief executive Howard Stringer, president Ryoji Chubachi and chief financial officer Nobuyuki Oneda outlined the details of the company's rebuilding process during a strategic meeting with management and key partners in Tokyo.

[Captain Japan]

My guess is he's the gaijin hatchet man.

Sony to cut 10,000 jobs, slash factories in restructuring drive
Mainichi

Sony to cut 10,000 jobs, slash factories in restructuring drive
Sony Corp. said Thursday it will cut 10,000 jobs globally, slash the number of factories and cut costs by 200 billion yen in a bid to revive its electonics business.

The Japanese company said it expected a group net loss of 10 billion yen in current fiscal year as plunging prices of consumer electronics products have taken a hefty toll on earnings.

The job cuts would result in a reduction of 4,000 workers in Japan and 6,000 elsewhere, while factories would be cut from the present 65 to 54, company officials said. (AP)

[Taro Toporific]

My guess is he's the gaijin hatchet man.

Can the Queen revoke knighthood for cowardice?

Sony Chief: Had To Tone Down Restructuring Plan
09-23-05 05:33 PM EST, DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Sir Howard Stringer, Sony Corp.'s (SNE) chief executive, said Friday that low workplace morale and Japanese cultural sensitivities about big redundancies had forced him to tone down his long-awaited restructuring plan...
... "I would have liked to have gone after a lot of unprofitable businesses, particularly, and that would have involved a lot more headcount. But there is no enthusiasm for getting rid of any unprofitable businesses. Everyone is connected to something," he told the FT.....more, if you can stand the yellow stench....

[Charles]

Sony Chief: Had To Tone Down Restructuring Plan
09-23-05 05:33 PM EST, DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
Sir Howard Stringer, Sony Corp.'s (SNE) chief executive, said Friday that low workplace morale and Japanese cultural sensitivities about big redundancies had forced him to tone down his long-awaited restructuring plan...
... "I would have liked to have gone after a lot of unprofitable businesses, particularly, and that would have involved a lot more headcount. But there is no enthusiasm for getting rid of any unprofitable businesses. Everyone is connected to something," he told the FT.....more, if you can stand the yellow stench....

He blew it. What's the good of being a hatchet man if you aren't going to make the cuts? He's going to fail no matter what, that's what gaijin CEOs are for. He might as well fail while making the cuts that save the company, rather than fail because he didn't make the cuts that saved the company.

[L S]

He is in a big balancing act between upper management and the Sony Board of Directors. I think he is savvy enough to know what he can and cannot pull off and is trying to find the balancing point. I am guessing he is testing the waters in the first step in his strategy. Key question is, can he turn the ship in a few rapid steps and get away with it or will it take to long for each step.....time will tell.

[cstaylor]

They should push AIBO as an ordnance delivery device and sell units to the U.S. military. Imagine thousands of incoming AIBOs, all armed with suicide bombs, dropped on Lil' Kim's palace in NK.

[Mulboyne]

Bloomberg: Sony Shares Post Biggest Gain in 15 Years on Forecast

Sony Corp. shares headed for their biggest gain in 15 years, raising the company's market value by $5 billion as higher sales of Bravia TVs and Playstation game players helped generate record profit in the third quarter...The results yesterday may signal a turning point for Sony, whose stock has lagged the Topix index by about threefold since 2003. Brokerages including UBS Securities Japan Ltd. and Nomura Securities Co. raised their ratings on optimism Chief Executive Howard Stringer's plan to cut jobs and invest in new products will help revive Sony's consumer electronics business...Sony yesterday revised its full-year forecast to a 70 billion yen profit from a 10 billion yen loss, after reporting net income unexpectedly surged to a record 168.9 billion yen in the three months ended Dec. 31. Sony also benefited from currency gains and a rally in Japanese stocks that boosted profit at its finance unit.

[Mulboyne]

This appeared before the earnings report...

BusinessWeek: How Turned Around Is Sony?

...Even Stringer seems to be proceeding with caution. "The worst thing that can happen to you is for things to go too well too soon," Stringer said in a recent interview with BusinessWeek. "I'm slightly nervous because I don't want Sony to fall back into any form of complacency"...more...

[Taro Toporific]

I had my doubts about Sir Stringer but this looks [I]cho-beri-goodo (although he should had these scumbag "advisers" covered in sewage, flogged, tarred, and feathered before firing them).[/I]

Sony gets rid of advisers as part of reform drive
Wednesday 22 February 2006, 2:50am EST
TOKYO, Feb 22 (Reuters) ----Sony Corp. said on Wednesday it was scrapping 45 adviser positions as part of its restructuring, leading to the departure of former president Kunitake Ando and other well-known names in its old guard.....
Sony's latest step will end a four-decade-old system under which executives were typically kept on as advisers after retiring from managerial posts. The system will be abolished at the end of March, eliminating 45 paid posts.
"We have had to cut jobs and with the operating environment as it is we decided to end the adviser system," a Sony spokeswoman said....more...

[Taro Toporific]

I had my doubts about Sir Stringer but this looks like ...< he's hanging in there against all odds>.

Howard Stringer, Sony's Road Warrior
theledger.com, 28 May 2006
....As his wife, Jennifer A. K. Patterson, observed at Mr. Murdoch's party, Sir Howard's new role is a potential "career breaker." The next several months promise to define the rest of Sir Howard's tenure at Sony as he tries to refocus this conglomerate's vast electronics business, shore up its film operations and jump-start its video game offerings, among a host of other challenges. If he fails to do so, more than just his resume may be blotted. As Sir Howard is the first to acknowledge, Sony may find itself permanently stunted.
If he pulls it off, the upside is equally substantial. "Sony is as complicated as it gets," said William Drewry, an analyst at Credit Suisse who is bullish on the company. "Stringer's not taking anything for granted, but the risk of him not succeeding, in my mind, is less than it was when he took over 11 months ago."....
...Some critics say Sir Howard's arrival in the executive suite represents a further westernization of a business that would be better off selling its Hollywood assets and moving back to its Japanese roots roots grounded in the creation and perfection of elegant electronic devices. Kazukuni Kobayashi, a former Sony employee who has written five books about the company's problems, including one called "Sony Sickness," is among those who think that the company should install a Japanese chief executive. "In Japan, Sony is an engineering company," Mr. Kobayashi said in an interview. "In America, it's a brand."
Takuma Miyazaki, a former Sony engineer who quit last year and wrote a book about the company called "Technological Hollowing," said: "Watching Sony now is like watching 'The Osbournes.' We see how pathetic our former hero has become."......more....

[otakuden]

Certainly the guy who headed Sony Entertainment in the US is qualified to head the global operation, but I was shocked to read this too. To my knowledge, only Ghosn has had such a visible position in a J-corp.

As a consumer, I had a feeling that they were having problems. Their stereos, telephones, and computers have sucked for years. I stopped buying Sony after two of their products I bought (a phone and a stereo) were malfunctioning right out of the box.

Does anyone agree with this analogy:

"The PS2 is to Sony what the iPod is to Mac."

I bet Mac enthusiasts will draw a distinction or two.

i'm not a mac enthusiast, but the ps2 is the pinacle of sony console g00dness, imo. the only decent thing that sony makes are their tvs. it's the only sony product i own and would recommend. ps3. pft. i'll take my 360 and ps2 thankyouverymuch

[Kuang_Grade]

The New Yorker (June 5 issue) also did large feature on him. No link is available but it did have some interesting bits...including a suggestion that he/others at Sony think that Sony's Japanese engineers have become so comfortable with English that they'd stopped relying on the typically more fluent sales staff to explain to them the nature of the Western consumer behavior,and, as a consequence, had become even more isolated from the realities of the global marketplace.

Some of Kutaragi's comments on the PS3's pricing would seem to indicate that.

[Taro Toporific]

Sony turns 60
Company focuses on rebuilding brand, restructuring to appeal more to consumers
The Associated Press, July 29, 2006
TOKYO......a growing gap between Sony creations and consumer sensibilities at the company that brought the world the Walkman portable music player. The company, which turned 60 this year, appeared to be losing touch with its customers.
"Sony used to be a company that had superior technology and cool design and created products that other companies didn't have," said Akihiko Jojima, author of "Sony's Sickness." "Sony has become merely a brand for brand's sake."...
.....Mitsuhiro Osawa, analyst with Mizuho Investors Securities, believes Sony has been humbled.
"In the past Sony was overly confident that whatever it would make would sell," he said. "Sony acted like it was a samurai king in business....

[Taro Toporific]

[floatl][/floatl]

Rots of Ruck, Sir Howard.

2007 predictions from the highly-respected, hi-tech commentator for PBS, Cringely X.

[INDENT]
Rupert Murdoch Doesn't Read This Column: predictions for 2007.
PBS.org : "I, Cringely" : January 5, 2007
This is my 2007 predictions column, where I first examine my predictions from 2006 to see how well or poorly I did (my multiyear average is around 75 percent) then provide a list of predictions for the current year ....

...my predictions from 2006....
7) PS3 is in trouble as is Howard Stringer. This is all true. The PS3 was late to market, the blue laser diode shortage has hurt the company, developers aren't amused, and the word inside Sony is that Sir Howard is toast. True.

...on to 2007 [predictions]! ....
6) Sony solves Blu-ray laser diode problem just in time for IBM to suffer production difficulties with the Cell processor. More bad news for Sony.
7) The Sony news is SO bad that it deserves two predictions. I would predict the fall of CEO Howard Stringer again if there were clearly somebody at Sony who wants his job. The business is in such difficulty that Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up....more...[/INDENT]

[Charles]

...The business is in such difficulty that Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up...

Actually, he IS making it up.

This is the eternal problem of partnering with Microsoft. By entering into any marketing agreement with the Beast of Redmond, you are surrendering your fate to another company, whose agenda might not fit yours. Microsoft is perfectly willing to allow its partners to die, or actively kill them if it thinks it can take over their market sector for itself. This is how monopolies work.

But all is not lost. In a tiny courtroom in Des Moines, Iowa, the final installment of the US DoJ v. Microsoft saga is playing out. The Iowa Attorney General refused to sign the 2002 Consent Decree that gutted the antitrust trial, and is proceeding with a separate antitrust action. That action, known as Comes v. Microsoft, is producing some fireworks of its own. Just yesterday, prosecutors announced they had evidence that Microsoft is violating the 2002 Consent Decree, which would be a whole pile of trouble for Bill Gates & Co.

[Kuang_Grade]

Actually, he IS making it up.

It certainly wouldn't be the first time.

And its not like Sony and MS are in all that many similar markets, just primarily video games and the world didn't end when SEGA closed up shop on its hardware business in the face of Sony's FUD campaign against the Dreamcast and MS's "let's lose a couple billion getting into the video game business" strategy with the xbox. Monopolies, if naturally (more or less) occurring, are not illegal in the US...However using your dominate position in one market to create or extend your presence in another market will lead to hard questioning by the government...so unless MS is thinking about offering 360s for free to people who buy Vista, there isn't an automatic issue for MS if Sony implodes...After all, at the rate that Nintendo is currently selling stuff, Nintendo might just bury them both, since it actually makes profit on its video game hardware and software while Sony and MS are still losing cash on every console sold.

[Kuang_Grade]

It is a bit long but it has some interesting quotes

Howard Stringer, Japanese CEO
Wall Street Journal March 3, 2007 Page A1
TOKYO -- Howard Stringer is annoyed. Since becoming Sony Corp.'s first foreign chief executive almost two years ago, he has been slammed by Japanese financial analysts and Sony employees for being disconnected from the company's daily operations, especially during two big crises. Investors in the U.S., meanwhile, have put him under constant pressure to fix Sony's problems more quickly. And he was hearing conflicting advice from both sides.

"Look, in America, I was told to cut costs," Mr. Stringer says. "In Japan, I was told not to cut costs. Two different worlds. In this country, you can't lay people off very easily. In America, you can."

In a series of interviews at the end of a tumultuous year for Sony. Mr. Stringer says he balanced those competing demands to squeeze 4% growth out of Sony's electronics business and beat earnings estimates for four successive quarters. Sony's stock price has risen 44% since he took over in June 2005. He bristles at criticism, mostly from Japanese, that he lives in a hotel when in Tokyo and spends too much time in New York and London to run the company effectively.

Says Mr. Stringer, sitting in a conference room in Sony's Tokyo headquarters: "If I'm not running the company, who the hell is?"

Fixing this iconic Japanese company is one of the biggest challenges in business. Mr. Stringer's dilemma is that he is caught between different management styles and cultures. He says he recognizes the risk of falling behind amid breakneck changes in electronics. But he says there's an equal risk in moving too aggressively.

"I don't want to change Sony's culture to the point where it's unrecognizable from the founder's vision," he says. "That's the balancing act I'm doing."

Whether he can pull it off is still an open question. For the Welsh-born executive, the task is complicated by having to navigate a sea of obstacles, from uncommunicative top executives -- one surprised Mr. Stringer with bad news at a board meeting -- to poor public-relations advice. The risk to Sony from his management-through-persuasion is that the company could fall further behind nimbler and more aggressive rivals. Mr. Stringer has already shifted gears once, adopting a more assertive stance after his softly-softly approach faltered.

When he became CEO, Mr. Stringer started cautiously. He knew that despite its global brand name, Sony remained a traditional Japanese company, full of employees with lifetime tenure who were suspicious of change. Japan had opened up to the idea of having foreign managers run Japanese companies, notably Carlos Ghosn at Nissan Motor Co., but it hadn't necessarily embraced the Western style of management.

Mr. Stringer, 65 years old, stuck with the executive team he inherited. He tried gently persuading managers to cooperate with one another and urged them to think about developing products in a new way.

The dangers of that approach quickly became clear. Two big missteps -- a delayed launch of the PlayStation 3 videogame console and an embarrassing battery recall -- tarnished Mr. Stringer's first years in charge. In both cases, managers tried handling problems in the traditional Sony way: quietly and without informing top executives.

Last fall, Mr. Stringer put together an executive team more to his liking. The reshuffle included moving an uncommunicative star executive, Ken Kutaragi, from his position running Sony's videogame unit. Mr. Stringer now receives every report about manufacturing problems -- "more emails than I care to read," he says.

In one of the interviews, Mr. Stringer counseled patience to his critics, noting that his turnaround of Sony's U.S. operations took five years to complete. "You can't go through a Japanese company with a sledgehammer," he said.

In another interview, conducted just after the battery-recall crisis, Mr. Stringer's forbearance was wearing thin. "I'm going to do what I want to do now," the chief executive said. "I'm not going to be following everybody's suggestions. I've got to be true to myself in some ways.

Mr. Stringer says nothing has changed in his management style. The perception of him as a hands-off manager, he says, was fueled by his decision to live in a Tokyo hotel. The CEO says he now regrets that decision, but also rejects as "insane" the notion that he wasn't firmly in control. He says his response to the crises wasn't a change of heart but a quickening of his long-term plans. He adds that his record has been obscured by the battery crisis, "which took too long for bizarre Japanese reasons that I don't want to spend the rest of my life discussing."

Mr. Stringer started life as a TV reporter. He spent nearly three decades at CBS Inc. -- he became a U.S. citizen in 1985 -- eventually rising to become head of broadcasting. He made his name at Sony leading a turnaround of its U.S. entertainment operations, including streamlining its movie and music businesses, slashing hundreds of jobs.

When he was named CEO, Sony was in a poor state, a company built on hardware engineering that was floundering in the age of software. For decades, Sony had produced the gold standard of consumer gadgets such as televisions and tape players. Sony made products the old way, first developing hardware, then, almost as an afterthought, adding software to make it run. The Walkman, the epitome of the company's success, was a triumph of electronics engineering; ever since, Sony's innovations have focused largely on hardware design -- making products smaller, thinner and lighter.

As Apple Inc. has shown, most spectacularly with its iPod music player, nifty software is the ticket to creating hit gadgets these days. In 2005, it wasn't only the iPod that was vexing Sony. Competitors such as Microsoft Corp. -- a software company -- were eating into Sony's gadget business, especially its famed PlayStation.

One of Mr. Stringer's goals was to encourage Sony's hardware engineers to treat software seriously when developing products. But Sony's culture celebrates proud innovators who do what they want. Many still quote an admonition by one Sony veteran: If you have the misfortune to be under a clueless boss, don't tell him about new ideas -- just execute them.

For example, last summer, more than 100 Sony colleagues attended a mock funeral thrown by famed engineer Toshitada Doi. He had resigned after his pet project, the Aibo robotic dog, was axed, one of many activities Sony deemed superfluous. At the ceremony, the 42-year Sony veteran recalls saying that the Aibo was a symbol of a risk-taking spirit that was now dead.

Mr. Stringer didn't know much about electronics, Sony's core identity, when he took over. His careful approach, a hallmark of his time in the U.S. as well, was evident from his first days, notably when he decided to keep -- and defer to -- the Japanese executive team chosen for him by his predecessor, Nobuyuki Idei. The executives were electronics veterans familiar with Sony's operations in Japan.

But soon after, Mr. Stringer was upset he couldn't unveil cuts in the company's product line because his top executives had not finalized their plans.

The executives "were all put in place," says Mr. Stringer. "What was I supposed to do? Show up on Monday and say, 'I don't like who you've given me?'"

Sony President Ryoji Chubachi emerged as Mr. Stringer's right-hand man. Mr. Chubachi, 59, was promoted at the same time as Mr. Stringer after having spent his career overseeing components such as videotape. His primary experience in software was the programs Sony embedded in hardware devices, not the kind of modern outlook Mr. Stringer was after.

"To be honest, it didn't click with me at first when Howard first talked about the importance of software," Mr. Chubachi says in an interview.

One casualty of Mr. Stringer's early hands-off style was Connect, a unit set up before his arrival that he nonetheless championed as an example of collaboration between hardware, software and services. Connect's task was to create a portable music player and online music service under the Walkman and Connect brands to challenge Apple's iPod and iTunes.

Connect had two presidents -- Sony hardware veteran Koichiro Tsujino in Tokyo and Philip Wiser, an online music pioneer, in New York. The two clashed. Mr. Tsujino wanted to build a new type of software from the ground up, while Mr. Wiser wanted a more conventional approach. As the feuding intensified, they complained to Mr. Stringer about the dual-president system, say people familiar with Connect. Mr. Stringer declined to intervene, asking the two to work out the problems on their own, the people say.

The new software packaged with the Walkman, a compromise solution, was so error-prone that U.S. executives refused to sell it. Sony eventually abandoned the software in Japan, too. By mid-2006, Messrs. Tsujino and Wiser had both quit Sony, and the Connect unit had been disbanded.

Mr. Stringer concedes backing off. But he says Connect was a vestige of the old Sony way of doing business, where executives ran independent fiefs. "We learned from the lesson that we are not developing software that way anymore," Mr. Stringer says.
.

[Kuang_Grade]

Continued...

After the Connect unit was disbanded, the entire business, including hardware, software and services, was moved to Sony's audio devices group under the control of Yutaka Nakagawa, an executive who was openly skeptical of the Connect music service, according to Sony managers. He told colleagues that Sony should concentrate on its strengths in hardware.

Mr. Nakagawa declines to comment, other than to say that Connect "didn't seem quite right."

Another stumbling block was Mr. Kutaragi, the renegade head of Sony's videogames division who invented the PlayStation videogame consoles, the company's most successful marriage of cutting-edge electronics technology and software. Mr. Stringer hoped Mr. Kutaragi would come up with similar hit ideas for Sony's other products.

Mr. Kutaragi was notorious within the company for his reluctance to communicate with his bosses or other units. In 2005, Mr. Kutaragi hosted an event at a big electronics conference in Las Vegas to celebrate the U.S. launch of the PlayStation Portable handheld game machine -- one of the company's biggest products that year. He didn't invite executives from Sony's electronics division, which provided the parts.

In developing the PlayStation 3 console, the device's latest iteration, Mr. Kutaragi went over budget on development costs without informing Mr. Stringer, according to a person familiar with the situation. When Mr. Stringer urged Mr. Kutaragi to have dinner with the heads of the electronics division, he did so just once a year, this person said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Kutaragi declined to comment.

Mr. Stringer tried to win Mr. Kutaragi's cooperation with patience. "I've had dinner with [Mr. Kutaragi] more times than I've had dinner with my wife, and that's not really healthy," Mr. Stringer says.

In September, Mr. Kutaragi announced Sony was halving shipments of the new PlayStation to the U.S. and Japan and was pushing back its European launch. At a news conference, Mr. Kutaragi blamed Sony's electronics group for failing to produce enough of a critical component, exposing his tense relationship with the division.

"If we're asked whether Sony's quality of manufacturing has declined, I would have to say 'yes,'" Mr. Kutaragi told reporters.

At a board meeting a few weeks later, Mr. Kutaragi sprang another surprise on Mr. Stringer, suggesting he drop the price of the entry-level PlayStation 3 console by 20% to just under 50,000 yen (about $420) to make it more competitive.

"It wasn't financially one of my best moments," Mr. Stringer says. "The budget implications were self-evident. [But] I agreed because I wanted the launch to be successful."

The price cut will help double videogame-related losses for Sony's year ending March 31 to about $2 billion, erasing many of the efforts made by other units to boost profitability. "I think it's fair to say that any time you're aiming for the stars, you're running the risk of falling a bit short on your timetable," Mr. Stringer says.

Meanwhile, another crisis was bubbling over. In August, Dell Inc. announced it was recalling 4.1 million laptop computer batteries made by Sony after the PC company decided they posed a danger of overheating and catching fire. Dell's recall triggered a stampede by other computer makers and prompted Sony to launch a voluntary global recall program in late September.

Mr. Stringer says he first heard about the magnitude of the problem not from his own managers but from Dell founder Michael Dell.

The problem: In Sony's typical independent fashion, the battery subsidiary, Sony Energy Devices Corp., tried solving the issue itself, says Mr. Stringer. Instead of treating the matter as a public-relations challenge, the battery executives saw it as one of engineering.

Mr. Stringer says he erred by deferring to his Japanese deputies' suggestion that he avoid public comments about the battery recall. The idea was to contain the problem in the components division, but Mr. Stringer's silence gave the impression among Japanese press and employees that he wasn't taking responsibility for one of Sony's worst public-relations disasters. The constant stream of reports about battery fires was "a kind of Chinese water torture," Mr. Stringer recalls, and prevented the company from putting a lid on the matter.

Within Sony, Mr. Stringer's silence disappointed some employees, several executives say. Some questioned Mr. Stringer's commitment to the electronics business because of his living arrangements in Tokyo, a complaint echoed among local financial analysts.

"Mr. Stringer has no background and he's not in Japan managing the day-to-day, so it's impossible" to run the company effectively, says Tatsuya Mizuno, an electronics analyst for Fitch Ratings. "Sony's DNA is in electronics...so the top management needs to understand what's going on there."

Mr. Stringer bristles at the idea that he isn't committed to Tokyo. "I have a home in England and I have a home in New York -- I'm already bloody cross-cultural -- and I just didn't want to be in a lonely apartment somewhere in Tokyo even for symbolic reasons."

At the same time, Mr. Stringer says he should have "faked it better -- I mean that seriously." He says Mr. Idei warned him about what might happen if he didn't establish a home here. "I should've put the flag up the flagpole and said here's my residence in downtown Tokyo -- I'm here! -- even if it's less practical than living where I live, and much less comfortable and friendly." He still lives in a hotel.

The two crises were a wake-up call. In videogames, Mr. Stringer says he persuaded Mr. Kutaragi to give up day-to-day control of the division in December; he remains chairman and chief executive, focused on next-generation games. Mr. Stringer replaced him with the U.S. head of the videogame unit, a longtime ally.

In electronics, Mr. Stringer moved Mr. Nakagawa, the executive who questioned the role of software, to a unit overseeing batteries, chips and other components. Messrs. Stringer and Chubachi receive daily emails alerting them about manufacturing problems companywide via a product-safety officer who was appointed in the fall.

Mr. Stringer also put all of Sony's consumer gadgets under Katsumi Ihara. Mr. Ihara played a key role in jump-starting the mobile-phone joint venture between Sony and Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson of Sweden, which has built a reputation for style.

Mr. Ihara has set up a task force, based in the U.S., to develop products that will allow users to download content from the Internet onto Sony products like the Walkman and PlayStation. He also created a center in Tokyo to develop software.

One early effort: a module for TVs that allows users to watch video from the Internet using a remote control. It uses some of the same software as the PlayStation 3 console.

Mr. Stringer says the rough experience of the past few months gave him an opening to speed up his plans. "All crises create opportunities," he says. "While we were being beaten up on the one hand, it was an opportunity to accelerate the transformation

[Taro Toporific]

[Yokohammer]

So is this effectively a promotion or a demotion?
Sounds like the latter, with respect.

[wagyl]

So is this effectively a promotion or a demotion?
Sounds like the latter, with respect.

I agree. From what I've seen of the process, it is a sinecure, a shifting out to pasture, where less information about the day to day business of the company gets to you, and you are treated with deference whilst being ignored. Completely.

[matsuki]

I agree. From what I've seen of the process, it is a sinecure, a shifting out to pasture, where less information about the day to day business of the company gets to you, and you are treated with deference whilst being ignored. Completely.

They can ignore me all they want for what they're still paying him

[wagyl]

People who rise up to CEO positions are ambitious, want to be the ones making policy decisions with their hand on the tiller. Being stuck all day in the spacious office with the huge desk with absolutely nothing to do, all sound muffled by the thick pile carpet, would be a special kind of hell for them.

[Samurai_Jerk]

People who rise up to CEO positions are ambitious, want to be the ones making policy decisions with their hand on the tiller. Being stuck all day in the spacious office with the huge desk with absolutely nothing to do, all sound muffled by the thick pile carpet, would be a special kind of hell for them.

Depending on the company, a chairman of the board doesn't necessarily have to sit in the office all day. Now this guy is my hero.

[IparryU]

Depending on the company, a chairman of the board doesn't necessarily have to sit in the office all day. Now this guy is my hero.

mocking the system and getting paid fat doing it...

[GomiGirl]

mocking the system and getting paid fat doing it...

He really comes off looking like an arse though. Gotta hope that karma will get him in the end - especially if he did grope those students initially.

[Coligny]

People who rise up to CEO positions are ambitious, want to be the ones making policy decisions with their hand on the tiller. Being stuck all day in the spacious office with the huge desk with absolutely nothing to do, all sound muffled by the thick pile carpet, would be a special kind of hell for them.

And most of the time have no fooking clue what they are doing...