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  3. Sony: Management by Whim In the late 1980s, Akio Morita

Sony: Management by Whim In the late 1980s, Akio Morita

游客2023-12-08  18
问题                      Sony: Management by Whim
    In the late 1980s, Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp, embarked on the most costly shopping expedition of his long career. A visionary who believed that Sony’s future lay in the convergence of hardware and "content" such as music and film, Morita eventually set his sights on Columbia Pictures Entertainment, with its two studios and a vast library of movie titles and television series. In September, 1989, after months of on-again, off-again negotiations, Sony agreed to pay the inflated asking price of $3. 2 billion and assume $ 1.6 billion in debt.
    What was the reason for such a decision? According to John Nathan’s Sony: The Private Life, it was motivated only by senior executives’ desire to please the company patriarch. Even Morita, then Sony’s chairman and CEO, believed that Columbia’s price tag, originally $ 35 per share, was too high. In a closed-door meeting in August, 1989, details of which have never been fully revealed, he told his seven top aides, who made up the decision-making executive committee, that he was abandoning the idea of the acquisition.
    That would have been the end of it had Morita not voiced regret over dinner that evening with the committee members. "It’s too bad," he grieved, "I’ve always dreamed of owning a Hollywood studio." The next day, the group met again and promptly decided that Sony would purchase Columbia after all. In the weeks that followed, Sony upped its bid from an initial $15 to $27 a share and, by late September, made a deal that was ridiculed by industry experts. In 1994, mismanagement forced Sony to write off $ 2.7 billion and assume a loss of $ 510 million for its Hollywood experiment.
    Sony: The Private Life is filled with such insiders’ tales, making it the most vivid and detailed account in English of the personalities who built the $ 50 billion-plus consumer-electronics giant. Nathan, a professor of Japanese cultural studies at the University of California, got access to dozens of executives who had contributed to or witnessed Sony’s development since its 1946 founding in war-devastated Tokyo. Nathan offers, however, only limited analysis of Sony, the corporation. And he tends to go over well-walked ground, how Sony established itself in the U.S. and how it developed famous products or devices. Much of this has appeared before in articles and, to a lesser extent, in books.
    This is not to say that Nathan’s book has no point of view. The company’s underlying problem, as illustrated in the Columbia case, is that the environment in which the Sony Corporation has historically conducted its affairs is less public than personal, less rational than sentimental. In conclusion, Nathan says that, under the current leadership of President Nobuyuki Idei, Sony is emerging as a rational company. Moreover, Idei and his practical-minded managers are intent on reinventing Sony as an Internet company. From now on, says Nathan, "personal relationships are not likely again to figure decisively. " But how will this Sony fare? Nathan admits that a dazzling future is far from guaranteed. [br] Which of the following is true of Sony’s acquisition of Columbia Pictures?
选项 A、It was motivated by Morita’s desire to project an image of success.
B、Sony’s top executives were quite convinced of its benefits for the company.
C、Entertainment industry insiders believed it was the failure of Hollywood.
D、It was the expensive expansion from electronics into entertainment.
答案 D
解析 本题考查事实细节。文章首句提到，盛田昭夫开始了他事业生涯中最昂贵的购物旅行。接着文章讲述了这一经历即索尼公司对哥伦比亚电影公司的收购过程。第一段第二句提到盛田昭夫作出该决定的理由，他认为索尼公司的未来在于硬件和软件(即音乐和电影等)的结合。因此是出于索尼公司未来发展的考虑，排除[A]项。从第二段和第三段的论述可知，即使盛田昭夫本人开始也认为收购举措过于昂贵。高级领导们最终决定收购是因为受盛田昭夫的影响。因此[B]不正确。第三段最后两句提到，这是一件为业界专家嘲笑的交易。管理不善最终迫使索尼公司为它的好莱坞实验注销掉27亿美元资产和5．1亿美元的损失。[C]项将“索尼公司”偷换成“好莱坞”。[D]项概括了这一收购行动的内容和特点，是正确答案。
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