Leadership and Changing Environments at Sony
Continually challenged both by environmental factors and a strong resistance to change internally, Sir Howard Springer faced daunting obstacles in turning around Japanese conglomerate Sony. The case study and myriad of industry analyst and media analyses of Sony during the time period of 2005 to 2009 concentrate heavily on the external factors that Sony contended with during this turbulent time in their corporate history. The macroeconomic factors are attributed as causing much of the turmoil at Sony when in fact it is in lack of emotional intelligence and transformational leadership guiding the firm.
Issue Identification
The management issue at Sony and the resulting financial and operational performance failures during the time period of the case is easily explained by economic factors and natural disaster, yet many corporations were able to weather these challenges and emerge stronger than before. Sony failed to overcome these challenges due to a lack of corporate structures, systems and approaches to collaboration and communication being inefficient at best and dysfunctional at worst. At the center of Sony's lack of cohesion and the ability to manage turbulent change is a lack of trust in Sir Howard Springer and across divisional and department boundaries. For trust to...
it's difficult to imagine how the disparate business units would come together to create synergies and drive innovation if one considers a quote by the CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, Michael Lynton, "I'm a guy who doesn't see anything good having come from the Internet...(the Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. it's as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open
Type of Intervention / Changes: A new focus on PC-related systems, a new relationship with Microsoft, and a shift in resources to the developing world Sony's current strategy is to make inroads into the American market with Microsoft and to focus on replicating the PC experience on mobile devices, to continue its European, luxury models with Symbian, and to expand its base in the developing world, thus adopting a multi-pronged strategy. Comment
Sony: A case study Change is constant in the technology industry and in contrast to some other product categories, there is relatively little consumer loyalty when the next new thing is looming on the horizon. Although the Sony Corporation had distinguished itself in the past, its fortunes were flagging in the early 21st century. Critical to its lack of development was the absence of cohesion: different divisions were more interested in
Sony Corporation The recorded music industry is in a state of flux. Thanks to technology, new opportunities have been made available, however, new challenges have emerged as well. The most significant concern is piracy, especially with peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet. Sony Corporation's business unit, Sony BMG, is a new merger of Sony Music Entertainment and Bertelsmann AG. The merger occurred as an effort to take advantage of economies of scale
Cultural Analysis of Sony Defining Organizational Culture: Organizational culture can be defined in several ways. The definitions that apply to this essay are discussed below. Morgan (1986) defined organizational culture as the development patterns as mirrored by the society's ideology, laws, knowledge system, daily rituals and laws. Schein (1985) says that organizational culture has relations with observed norms, behavioral regularities, policies, philosophies or values, the acceptable behavior and the sense of belonging
Resistance to Change Within Sony Corporation propose strategies that the current CEO Howard Stringer can Ilise to try to manage this resistance Morgan identified eight organizational perspectives that can be used as frameworks for organizational resistance. In the case of Sony Corporation, the CEO Howard Stringer faced resistance when he tried to introduce the western way of management. The employees resisted the changes, and this brought about many other issues. Using
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