SI: A Look Back At The 1971 Time Magazine Cover With Sony’s Akio Morita

[Christopher]

Not many people are aware that the co-founder of the Sony Corporation, Akio Morita, was on the cover of Time Magazine. I was able to find a nice high resolution image of this cover, and also the full article to accompany it. Here is an excerpt from section 8 of 11 in Japan, Inc.: Winning the Most Important Battle, printed May. 10, 1971: “Son of a manufacturer of soy sauce and sake, Morita started out as an engineer. As a wartime navy lieutenant he was assigned to help an engineer named Masaru Ibuka develop a heat-seeking bomb. After the defeat, Ibuka opened a communications-equipment business in a Tokyo shed, and Morita joined him. The two begged and borrowed $500 to start Tokyo Telecommunications Co., later Sony. Ibuka, who was Mr. Inside, developed the products and became president; Morita, Mr. Outside, specialized in marketing and became executive vice president.

Sony succeeded because its chiefs were among the first Japanese businessmen who did not copy Western products but used Western technology to develop new products of their own. Ibuka read about transistors and, in 1952, went to the U.S. to look at them. He became convinced that they could be used to make a radio. Morita visited the U.S. the next year and returned certain that the radios would sell fast in the U.S. He was amazed by the number of American radio stations and concluded that “everybody in the family will want to listen to his own program on his own radio.” The radios were an instant success abroad.

A long string of Sony products followed: the first small transistorized TVs, the world’s smallest AM radio, even the video-tape cassette recorders used by U.S. astronauts on Apollo moon flights. Their development is a tribute to Ibuka’s inventiveness and Sony’s highly flexible operating methods. The company, says Morita, is not constricted by a formal research and development budget; it simply pours as much money as seems necessary into a promising idea. Sony’s top managers also frequently tear up the organization table, assigning people from throughout the company to work on what looks like the next hot new product.”

Twenty-eight years later, Time Magazine would go on to name Akio Morita as one of the twenty most influential business leaders of the 20th century.

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