This is the kind of news I like to wake up to:

The Dodgers win big and Cardinals fans get their hearts broken.

Remember, it's not enough to win. The other guy has to lose, too.

Sony: The Private Life, John Nathan
Something more than a reporter's notebook dump, less than a comprehensive history of Sony, this book traces the history of personal relationships between the paramount leaders at Sony. It seems fair to summarize the book as, "Sony's key leaders, particularly Ibuka and Morita at the founding, later Ogha, and in the US Schulhoff, have had close personal relationships that have often influenced their business relationships." In that light, the book is interesting but narrow, with competent prose but a slightly repetitive structure.

The author boasts of fairly comprehensive access, appears to speak fluent Japanese, and often follows interviewee's statements with his own assessment of their honesty. The key things I learned, if Nathan's is taken as completely correct in his reporting and in his speculation, include:

• Sony's paramount leaders made many business decisions in private conversation, and then committees, the board of directors, and even nominally superior officers, all served as rubber stamps. That's not exactly surprising news for any company, but the details of how exactly that happens were interesting and convincing.
• Sony knew that the purchase of Columbia at the asking price, and poaching of Peter Guber, were bad business decisions, and decided to abandon the deal, but then resumed pursuit when Akio Morita expressed his personal desire to own a studio; this motivation is the best explanation for why Sony took steps that led to $3+ billion writeoff only a few years later.
• Peter Guber took Sony for a multi-hundred-million dollar ride. I already knew this, and I was aware of a book about it that I had no plans to read. So I didn't really need hundreds of pages rehashing it, bulked out by self-serving interviews from all involved.
• Two executives are primarily behind Sony's futile quest for synergy, former Sony America president Michael Schulhoff and 1990s Sony chairman Nobuyuki Idei. If there's one single thing (in my opinion) that has ruined Sony, it's trying to unify the content business and the electronics business. The hardware people want to make great gadgets that people love. The content people, at Sony and elsewhere, have a long history of dragooning governments into supporting outmoded business models through laws and intimidation. If a line of business has opposed player pianos, radio, cable tv, vcrs, and MP3s, why would you want to merge it with a consumer electronics company?

  Sony invented the walkman; they should have Apple's market share in the digital player market and Sony's own music business is the reason they don't. I seem to remember a story about tails and dogs and wagging. What does Sony's latest CEO say? "While we press for stronger legal protection, we are actively developing a new and more sophisticated generation of copy protection. DRM—digital rights management—will allow us to safeguard content on devices in a manner that is easy for consumers to use and understand." (Howard Stringer, 2004). Sorry, Sir Howard, but it's not going well so far.

• Akio Morita was a lousy father and husband.
• Sony's founders were unusually entreprenurial for Japanese businessmen, but still relied from day one on extensive personal and family networks for money and access.

I enjoyed the fly-on-the-wall boardroom accounts, unreliable but convincing, and I was touched by the relationship between Akio Morita and co-founder and mentor Masaru Ibuku. The scene in which, having built a business empire together and now both felled by strokes, they sit together in a hospital room holding hands, is universal. (Well, universal for the set of all emperors and kings of kings who survive to infirm old age, but I think the rest of us can see something there.)

Overall, the book was good but limited, and I would recommend it only to those already interested in the subjects.