Chapter 2 of Sony's story

Technology chapter 3

Chapter 2

On a Saturday in Tokyo, we held a department leadership meeting. Some people asked me why I didn't see the slogan in our advertisement recently. "research has made a difference ". We have to talk about it. I said that if we always say "Research creates a difference", our people may think that only research is enough to keep the company prosperous, but this is not the case. I gave an example of France. France is a country that believes that "research makes a difference", so they have many unique things. The engine design of the Kara Vera jet is at the end of the plane. This is a new idea. Many aircraft manufacturers have invested in counterfeiting, and French do not make any money. They failed to improve and develop the original design, thus losing their advantages in this aspect. Citroen manufactures hydraulic shock-proof vehicles. This is indeed a flexible concept and has a unique style. However, they have encountered problems and cannot launch such cars to the market. France manufactures advanced weapon systems, such as flying fish missiles, which have sunk British warships, atomic weapons, ships, supersonic fighters, and powerful arina-assisted rockets in the horse-island war, it can send satellites into orbit. (Except for a small amount of self-defense, we Japanese do not produce weapons. According to our constitution, they are not allowed to export anything that has a "military possibility, so we are not involved in this competition .) There is also a high-speed train TGV in France, which is faster than the bullet train in Japan, but other countries come to Japan to ask for high-speed railway technology.
The British invented the modern jet engine (Germany had built a jet engine at the end of World War II, when it was only used to produce a very small Mersey Schmidt 262 fighter. Germany was defeated before it could further develop such engines .) The British built the first jetship "Comet ". However, the comet has an unpleasant history. The UK has lost its leading position in engine and rack and is replaced by the United States.
In my opinion, it is unwise to just satisfy the difference. You must start a new business with new research results. This requires you to constantly update your products and stay ahead of the market. Our research director once talked about the importance of communication between the design research department and the business, distribution and marketing departments, and we have been trying to stimulate the market. I believe that Japan's industry has reached today's level because Japanese companies always think they are still in a backward position, so they are willing to be students and pay "tuition fees" to introduce foreign technologies, learn the latest technology. However, the knowledge learned from school is useful only after you add your own things, and you must do it yourself.
Not only for our company, but also for all companies, the challenge lies in the management of new technologies, new research achievements and new products. We need a lot of new ideas. We must bring together all our technologies to create a system we need in the future. This means great changes. When we started up, there was a department that produced transistors, a tape recorder and a radio. This will not work in the future. We must bring together all the engineering power of the company and make systematic use of it. We are starting to do this now. As long as employees are satisfied, various departments are responsible for each task in the company. Most companies, including our company, have done well so far. But in the future, it will require greater mobility. The engineering power of a company department may be associated with every place. Understanding how to use engineers most effectively will become a test of the success of companies in the new age. Our competitors will have some trouble from now on. They will realize that they have to build a complete system from a separate department, but the question is how to do it. In the future, technical management will become the key to the success of the company in any part of the world.
We are already in a leading position in this regard. At Sony, we hold a research and design report every month, attended by the company's top executives and leaders of various departments. Each meeting has five to six reports to introduce the latest research trends in important fields. The team in charge of a project must report to us the project subject, budget, overhead so far, planned schedule, actual progress, and estimated time to complete the project ahead of schedule or delay. Sometimes they bring machines or devices to us. For example, if they report a digital video recorder, it is indeed the highest secret. After hearing the report, we will let them out, then we will discuss the future commercial feasibility of this study. We have seen some reports as amazing development projects, but we still decided they were not commercially feasible for the company and put them aside. Sometimes we have spent a lot of money on some projects and finally gave up, because it will waste more money to let an unfeasible project continue. We spend so much energy on this because the cost of research and design reduces our profits and there is no reason to continue if it is not commercially feasible. It is the key to success to find out under what circumstances stop and under what circumstances continue.
Now we have a lot of departments. A few years ago, I saw a lot of repeated development in the company. Some work was carried out secretly in one department. In fact, it could benefit other departments. So now we hold a technical forum every month. Leaders and researchers at the Conference can discuss their current work. However, I think the most important thing is that we have also reorganized the highest institution and added a Planning and Coordination Department for the design of the study. In addition to reporting to the head of the company, this department, report to common accounting and planning personnel.
In the old system, I noticed that the accounting department was always late to learn what happened, as did the planning department of the company. It may have been a waste of money when they learned about the research and development overhead and ongoing projects in the early stages. After all, we are not a research institute, so when we decide to develop research and design, the company administrator should know the specific goal at the beginning.
This does not prevent us from conducting basic research. We have approved many such projects. For example, we use a new type of exotic material to make video 8 video head. This new material was developed by the metallurgical experts of our research center. We did not engage in Video 8 projects when approving the study of this new type of material, but we knew that high-density video would become an important area, so we approved this project. At the same time, when we did not even think of a 8mm video recorder, we thought we needed to study a new video head system. New materials will be welcomed and may need to be used, so it is time for this research project.
However, some projects were also put aside, such as a high definition plasma tube proposed by one of our researchers. In this example, as mentioned above, we invested some venture capital, and then the researcher decided to leave Sony to pursue his goal. Maybe we and others will benefit from this in the future, but I don't think we can continue to invest in that study now.