Sir Howard Stringer - Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President, Sony Corporation

 Sir Howard also serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sony Corporation of America, as well as corporate head of Sony Corporation's Entertainment Business Group. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Sony Corporation, a Board member of Sony Music Entertainment, and oversees Sony's other music-related holdings in the U.S. Sir Howard is also Chairman of the Board of Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications, a 50/50 joint venture of Sony Corporation and Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson. He joined Sony Corporation in May 1997.

Prior to joining Sony, Sir Howard had a distinguished 30-year career as a journalist, producer and executive at CBS Inc. As President of CBS from 1988 to 1995, he was responsible for all the broadcast activities of the company including entertainment, news, sports, radio and television stations. Under his leadership, the CBS Television Network became the first network to rise from last to first place in one season. In 1993, in what became one of the most chronicled coups in television history, Sir Howard convinced David Letterman to bring his critically acclaimed late night show to CBS.

From 1986 to 1988, Sir Howard served as President of CBS News, where he developed several new programs including the award-winning 48 HOURS, which continues as a primetime hit to this day. Prior to that, during his tenure as executive producer of the CBS EVENING NEWS with Dan Rather from 1981 to 1984, that program became the dominant network evening newscast of its day. From 1976 to 1981, while he was executive producer of the CBS REPORTS documentary unit, it won virtually every major honor, including 31 Emmys, four Peabody Awards, three Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, three Christopher Awards, three Overseas Press Club Awards, an ABA Silver Gavel and a Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize. Among his award-winning programs are THE ROCKEFELLERS, THE PALESTINIANS, A TALE OF TWO IRELANDS, THE DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES, THE BOAT PEOPLE, THE BOSTON GOES TO CHINA, THE FIRE NEXT DOOR, and THE CIA'S SECRET ARMY. He earned nine individual Emmys as a writer, director and producer from 1973 to 1983.

After leaving CBS Inc., Sir Howard was Chairman and CEO of TELE-TV, the media and technology company formed by Bell Atlantic, NYNEX and Pacific Telesis, three of the largest telephone companies in the United States, from February 1995 to April 1997.

Sir Howard is the recipient of numerous media and philanthropic awards. The Paley Center for Media (formerly The Museum of Television and Radio) presented him with its Visionary Award for Innovative Leadership in Media & Entertainment in February 2007. He has also been honored by Lincoln Center, Big Brothers Big Sisters and the New York Hall of Science. In May 1999, he was honored with the UJA-Federation of New York's Steven J. Ross Humanitarian Award and in November 1999, he was inducted into the Royal Television Society's Welsh Hall of Fame. In 1996 he was awarded the First Amendment Leadership Award by the Radio & Television News Directors Foundation in Washington, D.C., and was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame.

Sir Howard serves as Chairman of the American Film Institute Board of Trustees and is on the Board of Trustees of the Paley Center for Media. He is also North American Chairman of the British Army Benevolent Fund. He is a board member of The New York/Presbyterian Hospital, The American Theatre Wing, the American Friends of the British Museum, the Corporate Leadership Committee of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Carnegie Hall. A native of Cardiff, Wales, Sir Howard received the title of Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours list of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on December 31, 1999. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in modern history from Oxford University. He has honorary Fellowships from Merton College, Oxford, and the Welsh College of Music and Drama. Sir Howard has also received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Glamorgan in Wales and the London Institute. He is a recipient of the U.S. Army Commendation Medal for meritorious achievement for service in Vietnam (1965-1967). He became a U.S. citizen in 1985. He is married to Dr. Jennifer A.K. Patterson, a dermatologist, and they have two children.

Sony Corporation of America, based in New York, NY, is the U.S. subsidiary of Sony Corporation, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Sony is a leading manufacturer of audio, video, communications, and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. Its motion picture, television, computer entertainment, music and online businesses make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment and technology companies in the world. Sony's principal U.S. businesses include Sony Electronics Inc., Sony Computer Entertainment America LLC, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., and Sony Music Entertainment. Sony recorded consolidated annual sales of approximately $78 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2010, and it employs 167,900 people worldwide.

Howard Stringer: Career Milestones

Sir Howard Stringer
Chairman, CEO and President , Sony Corporation

Born in Cardiff, Wales, 1942. Earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in modern history from Oxford University, United Kingdom, prior to starting career with CBS Inc. in the U.S.

• Board of Trustees of the American Film Institute (Chairman)
• The British Army Benevolent Fund (North American Chairman)
• Board of Trustees of the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio) (Member)
• Board of the New York Presbyterian Hospital, Inc. (Member)
• Board of the American Theatre Wing (Member)
• Corporate Leadership Committee of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (Member)
• Board of American Friends of the British Museum (Member)
• Board of Teach for America (Member)
• Board of Center for Communication (Member)
• Board of Carnegie Hall (Member)
• Board of Sony Music Entertainment (Member)
• Board of Sony Ericsson (Member)
• Board of Sony Ericsson (Chairman)

Awards

Geographically, more than 6,000 miles separate Cardiff, a mid-sized port city in Wales, from Tokyo, a metropolitan area of 35 million people in Japan. Roughly the same distance separates Tokyo from New York, the command center of the global economy and media industry. Cardiff is where Howard Stringer was born on February 19, 1942. New York is where he made his reputation as both a world-class journalist and broadcasting executive. And Tokyo is where Sir Howard now spends much of his time as the Chairman, CEO and President of Sony Corporation.

Measured in life experience, Sir Howard's journey from modest beginnings--where he briefly lived in a home with no electricity--to his perch atop one of the world's largest and most innovative electronics and entertainment companies is neither as linear, nor as easily computed, as distances on a world map. He has been a scholarship student at Oxford, a young immigrant to the United States, a soldier in Vietnam, a much-honored journalist, a Hollywood deal-maker extraordinaire and a technology industry executive -- all before he came to Sony in May 1997.

That complex and compelling journey helps explain why Sir Howard is so well-equipped to lead Sony. Headquartered in Tokyo, Sony, which had worldwide sales of $78 billion in the year ended March 31, 2010, is one of the most global corporations on the planet. More than two-thirds of its approximately 170,000 employees work outside of Japan, and its shares are listed on four stock exchanges around the world. Its iconic brand is one of the globe's most familiar, and its products – television sets, digital cameras, music players, computers, video game consoles, music and movies – can be found anywhere with plugs and electricity outlets, and in a few places with neither.

At Sony, Sir Howard has emerged as a transformational leader, unafraid to tackle the job of shaking up a tradition-bound company. He has been known throughout his career less as a numbers guy or an operations specialist, but more as a creative and visionary leader, with an engaging sense of humor and an easy self-assurance that enables him to connect with people wherever he goes. And, first as a journalist, and, more recently, as a global business executive, he has been to all corners of the world during his remarkable career.

It's safe to say that Sir Howard is surely the world's only CEO who can take pride in having both fought in Vietnam for the United States Army, and kneeled before Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace to be knighted in July 2000. "Adapting to cultural phenomena has actually become intrinsic to my personality," he says. "You either adapt or go under." [Fortune, March 19, 2001]

His work philosophy is simple: "Whatever job you have, enjoy it. Do as well as you can, and don't think about the next job. If you work really hard, everything else will take care of itself." [Sony Family Magazine, July 2005]

At 6'3" inches tall, with curly blonde-gray hair and broad shoulders, Sir Howard cuts an imposing figure. It's easy to imagine him as the captain of his college rugby team at Oxford. What's harder to picture is the young Howard as a scrawny pre-teen scholarship student who arrived at Oundle, one of England's top-ranked boarding schools, not quite sure how he would manage.

"I was a little fellow when I arrived at school, and I was bullied a lot," he recalled. "English boarding schools are tough, self-contained societies, and it's survival of the fittest. There's not a lot of room for individualism, and you have to become something of a chameleon to adapt and fit in.

"I had it better than the other kids on scholarship because my father was an Air Force officer with some social status, but you couldn't help being aware of the great disparities in wealth. Every time I went home from school, we had moved; I had 15 different home addresses by the time I was 18 years old because my father was transferred so often. I think that both experiences made me more gregarious. In those circumstances, you need relationships. If you didn't reach out to people, you'd be very lonely."[Los Angeles Times, December 19, 1993]

Many factors, including a bit of luck, have helped Sir Howard rise to the top of the business world: his brainpower, his creativity, his business acumen. But more than anything, his ability to motivate and inspire people—those survival instincts learned as a child—set him apart from others. He genuinely enjoys people, he wants others to succeed, and people like to be around him.

Peter G. Peterson, a New York investment banker, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and longtime Sony board member who helped recruit Sir Howard to Sony, put it this way: "He's got the kind of personality that lubricates human relationships. He's easygoing, and he laughs a lot, and he's not confrontational. That approach is much more likely to get things done in a consensual environment."[Fortune, March 19, 2001]

The older of two children, Sir Howard was raised all over the U.K. by his father, Harry, a private in the Royal Air Force who rose to the rank of squadron leader, and his mother, Marjorie, a schoolteacher. (His younger brother Robert is a music industry executive.) Sir Howard attended private schools on scholarship. As a young music lover, he sang soprano in the choir, and later played the trumpet. He played rugby and was a hurdler on the school track team. At Oxford, he was steward of the college student body. He graduated in 1964 with B.A. and M.A. degrees in modern history. After driving a truck to earn enough money to pay for his passage, he set sail for New York with $100 in his pocket, hoping to land a job in television.

"It was a sluggish time for the British economy," he later explained. "There was no excitement in either the political or business landscape. In America, it was just after President Kennedy had been killed, and President Johnson was leading the Great Society. It was a very dynamic society with opportunities to do things you weren't expected to do….To me, going to the U.S. was a personal adventure." [Sony Family]

He sent out about 20 job applications. The only company that responded was CBS. Sir Howard, who had seen Edward R. Murrow and George Burns on British television, knew CBS was the broadcast industry leader. The network hired the well-educated newcomer as a clerk to log commercial times at the CBS-owned television station in New York. There was nowhere to go but up.

Instead, to his astonishment, Sir Howard was drafted into the U.S. Army a few months later. "I have three choices," he told a friend. "I can go to Canada, as many are doing. I can go back to the U.K., or I can stay here and get drafted." [The Independent, March 21, 2005] He opted for the risky path, entering the army, which shipped him to Vietnam.

If you talked to Sir Howard about his military experience, you would hear many self-deprecating jokes. Even at the time, he found some humor in the situation. In a letter to one of his Oxford tutors, which was later excerpted by The New Yorker, he wrote: "It's rather disillusioning to discover that one is a coward after all, despite the rigors of a public school education. All those cold showers and early morning runs were in vain?" When people later noted that he was a decorated veteran, he would say: "You get some medals for simply showing up. And I was actually in charge of medals." Still, there were close calls. On his last day in Vietnam, in the troop plane that would take him home, Sergeant Stringer came under tracer and mortar fire from the Viet Cong.

He returned to CBS with a stronger sense of purpose. "Vietnam had taken away some of my youth and naiveté," Sir Howard said. "When I came out of Vietnam, I thought I had something to say. And journalism was the best way to say it." [Sony Family] He began at all-news WCBS Radio, soon moved to television news, and found a home at CBS Reports, the network's prestigious documentary unit, where he spent more than a decade.

Sir Howard wrote and produced programs on civil strife in Ireland, the Palestinians, the FBI and the Rockefeller family. As head of CBS Reports from 1976 to 1981, he oversaw notable and hard-hitting projects, including the five-hour The Defense of the United States, a critical look at the military-industrial complex. "It is probably the most important show I ever did," he said. [Sony Family] He won nine Emmy Awards for writing, producing and directing documentaries.

Producing television programs requires intense collaboration — with correspondents, researchers, writers, photographers, editors and network executives -- all of whom have strong opinions. Sir Howard's experience as a producer taught him that "you have to create a team that can accomplish far more than you ever think you could alone." [Sony Family]

Many CEOs fail because they try to go it alone. That was never his way. "Unlike many executives," Sir Howard says, "I really do rely upon people who know a lot more than I do. I'm very careful to surround myself with people who fill in a lot of the blanks. I didn't go to school in management. I never wanted to bloody well be a manager." [The New Yorker, June 5, 2006]

However, Sir Howard's management skills were tested at CBS News from 1986 to 1988 when he served as president of the division. This was a time when all of the broadcast networks were losing audience and advertisers to cable competitors. A new owner and CEO of CBS, Laurence Tisch, who had installed Sir Howard as the news president, soon demanded that he reduce costs. Sir Howard complied, cutting the news budget by $36 million, or about 10 percent, and laying off 215 people, including longtime colleagues. He was torn between the economic realities of the business—watching expenses was prudent, and news operations had become bloated—and his loyalty to the fraternity of journalists who worried about the quality of news. In the end, he made no one happy. "It was the loneliest moment of my life," he said. [People, April 5, 1993]

Happier times followed. Sir Howard was named president of CBS in 1988, a job that gave him oversight of all news, sports and entertainment broadcasting, plus the 22 radio and television stations then owned by CBS. The network was in trouble, occupying last place in the ratings and recoiling from its worst primetime season ever. In no time at all, Sir Howard set a strategy, assembled a group of well-regarded executives to work with him, and made a number of strategic moves--and one celebrated hire--to get the network back on track.

In his biggest broadcasting coup, he persuaded popular late-night host David Letterman to leave NBC, the only network for which he'd worked, to launch CBS's first-ever successful late-night franchise. Significantly, in a world of high-priced entertainment stars, money was not the decisive factor. Sir Howard waged a no-holds-barred recruiting campaign that appealed both to Letterman's ego and to his wicked sense of humor. Sir Howard sent the talk-show host a couple of gag gifts, including a framed Civil War photograph of a dour man named Col. Letterman, inscribed, "This has got to be a relative--he looks too miserable not to be." Getting Letterman to CBS and locating him in the old Ed Sullivan theater in 1993 paid off right away. Letterman's Late Night program continues to bring significant ratings and profits to the network to this day.

As a network executive, Sir Howard had few peers when it came to courting talent. After getting to know Sir Howard, Angela Lansbury, the British-born star of the long-running CBS drama Murder, She Wrote, told a reporter: "We all feel like we're in a family again." [People, April 5, 1993] Burt Reynolds, who starred in a CBS comedy called Evening Shade, once gave Sir Howard a bronze statue of a bronco rider inscribed: "To the only network president I can hang out with and still love."

By the mid-1990s, though, the broadcasting business was struggling, Larry Tisch was shopping CBS around, and Sir Howard wanted a new challenge. Michael Ovitz, the Hollywood super-agent who represented Letterman and had come to admire Sir Howard, approached the CBS executive with a deal that, Sir Howard would later joke, made him chief executive of a phone booth. He signed on as CEO of a startup called Tele-TV, a joint venture of Pacific Telesis, Bell Atlantic and Nynex that was created to lead the phone companies into the world of interactive television. It was a departure in more ways than one for Sir Howard, who, during a lifetime as a broadcaster, had been a frequent critic of pay television and a skeptic about interactive TV.

The Tele-TV job was fraught with difficulties: technologies that were ahead of their time, budgets that didn't quite materialize, bureaucrats from the telephone companies who didn't see eye-to-eye. "The irony,"Sir Howard said, "is that I went from a situation where things were out of my control to a situation where things are out of my control."[Fortune, May 27, 1996] While Tele-TV taught him a lot about how technology and entertainment could be married, it took the phone companies another decade to achieve their goal, and to successfully link their assets with television. Sir Howard didn't want to wait that long. The experience, however, opened the door to another opportunity.

He took another risk, accepting a small job with a big title--President of Sony Corporation of America–but little in the way of real power. Most of Sony's U.S. businesses reported not to him, but to Tokyo. His salary was less than he earned at Tele-TV or CBS. "If a job is worth doing, that is more important than the salary," he later explained. [Sony Family] Besides, he knew that Sony had taken a terrible beating after it bought Columbia Pictures, a Hollywood studio, back in 1989. He intended to play a healing role, gradually winning the trust of Sony executives in the U.S. and Tokyo. And he knew that the job had great potential, particularly if Sony's entertainment properties and its electronics business could be made to cooperate more closely. Eventually, Sir Howard was given authority over Sony's U.S. operations—first the music and movie studios, then electronics. After that, he got down to the grueling task of getting Sony's creative, technical and business people in the U.S. and Japan--who, literally and figuratively, spoke different languages--to work together. His life and prior professional experience had brought him to this point. He was well suited to the job of breaking down silos, and it would become a distinctive and important theme of his leadership at Sony.

As head of Sony Corporation of America, Sir Howard compiled an impressive record. The company's entertainment businesses more than doubled their operating profits to $1 billion by FY2004, and they expanded their operating margins to 8%. Widespread restructuring in the movie, music and U.S. electronics operation reduced costs by about $700 million a year, in part by sensibly sharing such services as IT, HR and back-office functions. Sony Music merged with BMG under his watch, creating the world's second largest music company. And, Sony, along with Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Comcast and other partners, acquired the fabled MGM studio. The MGM relationship would prove critical in the coming years when Sony needed Hollywood's support for Blu-ray during that format war. The relationship also enabled Sony to produce the most recent James Bond films "Casino Royale" and "Quantum of Solace," which were record-breaking international box office hits.

Years earlier, at headquarters in Japan, Sony's leaders saw that the future of their business would require linking hardware, software and content. In 2001, when most people still accessed the Internet over slow telephone connections, Sony's then-CEO, Nobuyuki Idei, envisioned a world in which a vast array of content would be delivered over high-speed broadband connections on a variety of networked devices.

Turning this dream into a reality proved difficult. The challenge was partly cultural and partly structural. Because Sony became a great company by making breakthrough consumer electronics products that stood on their own, its most talented engineers tended to focus on hardware and its design, rather than on software. Like other Japanese companies, Sony also rewarded longevity, so the kinds of young innovators who rise to the top quickly in Silicon Valley found it hard to be heard inside Sony. What's more, its historically independent business units operated in silos, making it difficult for people, and products, to communicate and share with one another. Sony took a cautious approach as the Internet grew; thus, unlike other entertainment giants, it didn't lose vast sums of money on ill-fated experiments. But by the mid-2000s, Sony was trailing its competitors in the fight for digital supremacy.

Globalization and digitization created a second set of problems for Sony. Almost as fast as it developed and produced new products, cheap knockoffs were built in China or elsewhere in Asia. Dozens of little-known brands produced television sets, cell phones, digital cameras and DVD players. They may not have been as stylish as Sony's, but they were good enough for many customers, and they sold for less. The resulting commoditization made it more difficult for Sony to command premium prices for high quality products. By 2005, its core electronics business was losing money.

The company turned to Sir Howard, naming him its Chairman and Chief Executive Officer that year, the first non-Japanese to head the iconic company. He immediately set out to inject some fighting spirit into an operation that had been a little too nice,