Sony Needs a New CEO

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 flourish in any organization, a leader needs to transform the culture to one of shared vision and a series of accomplishments everyone believes in and takes ownership of (Guay, 2013). Instead of striving to create a collaborative environment, Sir Howard Springer deliberately chose to further create conflict, confusion and discord in the midst of many of the greatest challenges the company had ever seen (Schermerhorn, 2014). Sir Howard Springer needed to more effectively manage the external turbulence by orchestrating Sony's formidable ability to innovate. Transformational leaders that guide their organizations to exceptional levels of performance are capable of creating a foundation of trust which in turn creates a strong catalyst for innovation and continued growth (Gumusluoglu, Ilsev, 2009).

Critical Discussion

Sony suffered through a period of exceptional series of economic and a catastrophic natural disaster yet still stayed in business, and still failed to find the catalyst in these events to galvanize the company together to an urgent, highly relevant goal that would drive all dissension out. Instead of taking a defensive, highly protectionist approach to running their business using leadership paradigms and frameworks more attuned to growth markets, Sony's leadership could have taken the crises they were given and made them a galvanizing moment for the company. Sir Howard Springer failed as a leader in this regard, choosing to look for convenience and safe harbors as evidence by the safe decisions made in the case during severe economic storms instead of striving to make the company strong enough to survive the challenges. Sir Hoard needed to confront the fact that Sony was far out of step with the broader markets it served, and the economic challenges and the aftereffects of natural disasters just accentuated and amplified this fact. Instead of concentrating on how to be brutally honest with the leaders of the company about just how far out of step they were with market served as evidenced by declining sales, Sir Howard kept choosing safe and acceptable paths and in so doing drastically impacted Sony's chances in turbulent, recessionary markets.