The Interview: Howard Stringer

Sony has appointed its first non-Japanese head of global operations. And he's a Cardiff-born, Oxford-educated, Vietnam war veteran who nearly got shot down by the Viet Cong. He talks to Raymond Snoddy

One day in 1965 Howard Stringer called his college friend Roger Laughton in need of some very urgent advice. After completing his history degree at Oxford, Stringer, 23, had sailed to New York on the SS United States, attracted by the aura of Kennedy, the "new frontier" and the notion that America might be both a land of opportunity and a lot less stuffy than the UK.

His first job - fetching the mail and logging comments on The Ed Sullivan Show at the CBS broadcasting network - may have been modest but it was a start.

And then the draft papers for Vietnam arrived.

The options, outlined to Laughton, were very simple but each in its own way was life-changing.

"I have got three choices. I can go to Canada as many are doing. I can go back to the UK or I can stay here and get drafted," says Stringer.

Laughton - who was studying in the US at the time - was definitely going back to Britain and a traineeship at the BBC. He advised Stringer to do the same. But in a mixture of what he describes as "stubbornness" and an unwillingness for the story to end before it had really begun, Stringer chose the most difficult path and the draft to Vietnam. It was the most important decision the tall amiable Welshman has ever made.

Two years later Sergeant Stringer, a decorated member of the US Army Military Police, was sitting on his troop plane as it prepared to take off on its homeward journey to the US - only for Viet Cong machine gunners to open up as the plane went down the runway.

"We could see the tracers coming at us and I thought this is really great. I went all the way to the United States, got drafted and was brought down on my last day in Vietnam," says Stringer.

In fact, although the plane was hit, it made it - somewhat prophetically as it turned out - as far as Okinawa in Japan. "After that experience in Vietnam I thought I may have seriously miscalculated my life altogether," Stringer says of his feelings at the time.

Almost 40 years later, Sir Howard Stringer, 63, is the first non-Japanese head of Sony. Having determined to return to America and make his name as a journalist, the Cardiff-born son of a Royal Air Force squadron leader, who won a scholarship to Oundle, a private school near Peterborough, had been put in charge of one of the best-known corporations in the world.

He learned of the appointment last month when he was just about to leave for one of the high-powered lunches that litter Hollywood on Oscars day.

As he was about to go out the door, Stringer, already chairman of Sony America, took a call from Nobuyuki Idei, the global head of the company, who was about to retire at the age of 68. Idei said he had decided whom he wanted to succeed him, and it was Stringer. Being the first gaijin (foreigner) to run the multinational media, music and consumer electronics giant was a job that Stringer was not looking for and never expected to be offered. Things were going well at Sony America and he was looking forward to taking things a little easier and being able to spend more time with his wife, dermatologist Dr Jennifer Patterson, and his family in the UK. The Stringers have a home on Bledlow Ridge in the Chilterns.

Suddenly, instead of seeing more of his Oxfordshire country retreat (it has riding facilities and swimming pool but is not ostentatious), he faced the prospect of eating more airline food and taking sleeping pills to get his rest while airborne.

"I said I do understand this is an unusual honour but I am going to have a week to think about the consequences of all of this and whether indeed I can do it," says Stringer. The excitement of the job offer rather overshadowed the Oscars. Although Sony Pictures was the box-office leader last year it won only one Academy Award, for special effects in Spider-Man.

One of the key reasons why Stringer decided to say yes after his week of contemplation was the number of Japanese executives from Sony who rang, one by one, and urged him to accept the job. If there had been silence his answer would have been different.

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of a major Japanese corporation - albeit one of the least traditional - calling in an outsider to take tough decisions for the future that could lead to restructuring and probable ultimate job losses. There is a strong and growing feeling that Sony needed to become even more international to cope with ever more competitive markets.

Stringer takes over as chairman and chief executive of Sony in June. He will have reached the high point of a career that has seen him climb almost every rung of the ladder. From logging calls for Ed Sullivan to winning nine Emmy awards as a television writer, director and producer, to becoming president of CBS, the Stringer story has been one of relentless progress.

He was the first broadcasting chief to take his network from last place to first in the ratings in the space of a year. He shocked the television industry by poaching the legendary late-night talk show host David Letterman from NBC.

Throughout his career, time after time Stringer has got jobs he was not expected to get, usually jobs he had not even applied for, and then has done them surprisingly well. One of the few exceptions was the day Stringer, who had earlier turned down an approach to run ITV, was invited to join the short-list for the director-generalship of the BBC in succession to John Birt. At the time he was already chairman of Sony America and inquired most carefully to ensure that he was not being asked to fly the Atlantic just to make up the numbers - that he was a serious candidate. He was told he was.

Then one governor asked whether he had any experience of running large organisations. Another inquired whether at 58 he was not too old to run the BBC. Stringer muttered that he was only six weeks older than when first approached.

"I was a bit shaken because until I showed up at the interview I thought I was a serious candidate. It took me about two minutes to realise I wasn't a serious candidate. It was a great honour to be asked but in fact the decision had already been made," says Stringer, who was left a long way behind Greg Dyke in the pecking order drawn up by the governors.

Looking at the BBC now he believes there are many similarities with Sony.

The BBC is also a large bureaucracy but at the same time there is essentially "the same pride in the organisation and the same determination to be taken seriously".

But how will a Cardiff-born British American who does not speak Japanese deal with the subtleties of running a Japanese corporation and the sheer physical strain of taking charge of a $72bn global empire with obvious issues?

"I did try a bit to learn Japanese but it was somehow debilitating because it raised eyebrows. First of all they gave me points for trying when I first showed up and then it seemed like a lost cause," says Stringer rather sheepishly.

"It seemed more important to learn the details of the electronics company than it was to learn the language. Doing something badly is a bit discouraging and people then think you do everything else badly," he adds.

Sony is also an atypical Japanese company. Around 70 per cent of its employees are outside Japan and many of the Japanese executives have worked overseas. One speaks English with a pronounced Alabama accent.

As for the travel, Stringer believes it won't get that much worse. Already he hardly ever spends more than two weeks in the same place and visits Japan once a month. Now his Tokyo visits will last a bit longer although he says his Japanese colleagues have promised that they will travel to New York to see him more often and video conferencing is improving all the time. There will, however, probably be less time to spend in Hollywood in future.

Michael Lynton, the head of Sony Pictures, currently raking in the money from hits such as Spider-Man, Hitch and Closer, was as surprised as everyone when Stringer got the top job, a development he describes as "a whole new thing".

Lynton, who used to run Penguin books for Pearson, believes there were a couple of key factors. "On the one hand, they realised they needed a change agent which Howard is and he does not shirk that responsibility, yet on the other hand he has an understanding of the company and all the personalities involved and the company has a very strong culture," says Lynton.

In the Japanese media there was no sign of hostility to the arrival of a burly if avuncular outsider. In fact, in a briefing with senior Japanese journalists there appeared to be no sense of shock that a non-Japanese speaking Anglo-American with no background in electronics was taking over. They were fascinated by one thing.

"The funny thing is they were thrilled that a former journalist had got the top job. I told them 'look folks you too can be head of Sony' and they all liked that," says Stringer, who can schmooze with the best of them.

Another key factor behind his rise was that Sony America under his command has been a considerable success - particularly on the media side. He has got the three divisions - films and television, music and consumer electronics all working together as an integrated organisation. Last year, he also boosted the content side by helping to push through the acquisition of MGM, which gives Sony access to a 4,000-title film library, and then orchestrated the merger of Sony's music division with that of the German multi-national Bertelsmann, creating a new top dog in the industry.

The flurry of activity reflects Stringer's belief that Sony's unique offering revolves around the marriage of content and the devices that play it and both have to be strong, he believes, for the company to succeed in future.

"I think a lot of decisions that will be required will echo the decisions we have made on a slightly smaller scale in the US, and much of that is a by-product of management. The three leaders of the three operating companies in the US, one of which is Japanese, now communicate very smoothly and very enthusiastically," he says.

The main problem with Sony has been in electronics rather than media, and the division has had to issue a profit warning. Competition has been fierce across the piste and critics point to how Sony has been wrong-footed by Apple's iPod - although Stringer argues that Apple's profits amount to little more than that of Sony Pictures.

Apart from perhaps concentrating more firepower on a smaller number of devices brought to market more quickly, getting a flatter management structure and dynamiting any unnecessary hierarchies, Stringer says his task is to set a strategy and do it quickly. "One of my main jobs is to motivate and encourage a lot of really smart engineers and we are not short of those, thank heavens," he says.

Motivating people is clearly one of his key skills. Award-winning cameraman and CBS producer Peter Bluff - another Brit - has known Stringer almost from the beginning, since the time when the Welshman was head of the CBS Evening News, and has watched the phenomenon in action.

"He has the 'let's give it a try, let's roll the dice' quality of the old-fashioned television executive and he's very loyal," says Bluff. "I'm sure he slits your throat if you fuck up but I never saw it. I know everyone likes to say he is a man who is very good at dropping loads of people from a company and not noticing, but if you get it right and you've got his trust you would get his backing and that is a very good way to work."

Bluff still gets lifted off the ground in a bear-like hug by Stringer whenever the two men meet.

Loyal and determined maybe, but still, how do you get from the lowest possible rung on the ladder of a TV network to running one of the world's leading corporations?

It was a puzzle that Roger Laughton, former chief executive of Lord Hollick's United Broadcasting and Entertainment, pondered with another mutual friend of Stringer's from the old days at a recent lunch.

"Both of us agreed he has extraordinary social skills alongside his business skills. I don't know how good he is as a businessman but in terms of leadership and the ability to get the best out of others Howard is outstanding," says Laughton. He also makes the effort to keep in touch with friends from all the way back. At his silver wedding party last year, Idei, the Sony chairman, was there as was Ben Bradley, the legendary editor of The Washington Post, and American television grand dame Barbara Walters. But his old mates from Merton College, Oxford, were there too.

As he prepares to try to find a future path for Sony, Stringer is very optimistic about the future of the media in the UK - although for him more big deals are off the agenda for the time being.

When he gave a lecture at the Royal Television Society in December, Stringer teasingly asked which country it was that enjoyed all of the following assets: the English language, cosmopolitan centres that attracted artists, creators and business people from all over the world, global reach, a reputation for both content and technology, easy access to both American and European markets and a public service broadcaster that offers quality and choice across all genres?

There are a few hurdles to be negotiated first - not least the tricky issue of convergence. Stringer is an expert on convergence and has the scars to prove it.

In another of his rare misjudgements in 1995 the broadcasting executive became chief executive of Tele-TV, a convergent media company set up by telephone companies. It was too early and the company went belly up. It could have been the end of Stringer's career.

"It's a complex issue and not one where you can get dogmatic and say we must have convergence," Stringer explains.

"People ask is convergence going to happen. Of course - because these digital devices talk to each other. We have to fight to create the sort of integration that is necessary today. It's just not an analogue world and a digital world; it's a de facto convergent world," he insists.

Is there a future for network television in such a world?

"Network television is not an automatic money-spinner in its daytime programming but in aggregate with all the stations and cable channels they own it's still a very profitable business," he says.

Likewise the BBC prime-time schedule, he believes, is a powerful engine for driving brand awareness and all the other things the corporation wants to do.

But is there going to be yet one further neat twist to the remarkable career that first started to take off when a plane leaving Vietnam was not shot down?

The end of Michael Grade's stint as chairman of the BBC Trust, which will replace the board of governors, could coincide with Sir Howard Stringer's last trip back from Japan. This time he really would be a serious candidate - as long as he wasn't judged too old or lacking in sufficient knowledge of how large organisations are run.

SONY'S BRAVE NEW WORLD

1946: Akio Morita, Masaru Ibuka and Tamon Maeda establish the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation.

1950: They produce the first Japanese tape recorder, the G-type.

1955: The company produces Japan's first transistor radio, the TR-55.

1958: The company changes its name to the Sony Corporation.

1960: Sony Corporation of America is established in the US.

1963: Launches world's first compact transistor videotape recorder.

1968: Sony UK Ltd established. Sony launches the Trinitron colour TV.

1974: Sony TV assembly plant opens in Bridgend, south Wales. In San Diego, Sony opens a cathode ray tube plant.

1979: The Sony Walkman is launched, the first personal stereo with headphones.

1982: Sony launches the world's first compact disc player.

1988: The company acquires CBS records.

1989: It buys Columbia Pictures Entertainment.

1994: The Sony PlayStation is launched.

1999: Akio Morita dies.

2003: The financial world is stunned as Sony announces results that are well below expectations.

2005: Howard Stringer becomes Sony's first non-Japanese chairman.