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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  25
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] It can be inferred from the last two paragraphs that______.
选项 A、Sony: The Private Life is the biography of Akio Morita
B、Sony’s Japanese leaders have been too practical-minded
C、the management problem of Sony cannot be rectified overnight
D、Nathan did not write about how Sony established itself as the electronics giant
答案 C
解析 本题考查推理引申。第四段提到，《索尼公司的私人生活》成为建立索尼公司的名人们(personalities who built)最生动详细的描述。内森接触了目睹公司发展的很多执行者。但是，内森只提供了对索尼公司的有限的分析，他总是重复讨论多次的话题，即索尼公司如何建立，如何发展产品和设备。由此可推出，这本书描写了多个人物，且提到了索尼公司的成长过程，排除[A]和[D]项。第五段第二句提到，从哥伦比亚事例体现出来的索尼公司的潜在问题是公司环境较个人化而非公开化，较感性而非理性。结合盛田昭夫的行为，显然可排除[B]项。全文最后提到，索尼公司正成为一个理性的公司，个人关系(在索尼公司中)不可能再起决定作用。但是这个索尼公司将经营得如何?美好的未来远不能得到保证。由此可推出[C]项正确。
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