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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  7
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] The word "patriarch" (Line 5, Para. 2) most probably means _____.
选项 A、founder
B、monarch
C、elder
D、forerunner
答案 A
解析 本题考查根据上下文猜测词义。第二段首句指出收购哥伦比亚电影公司的决定是出于高级执行管要取悦公司……的愿望。下文对该观点进一步进行阐释。盛田昭夫开始觉得收购价格太昂贵，但后来改变注意，促使其团队重新决定购买。由此可推出文中patriarch一词指的是盛田昭夫。由文章首句可知他是索尼公司的联合创始人之一，因此[A]项正确。
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