Sir Howard Stringer: Sony's Savior?

Lesley Stahl Profiles Head Of Japanese Electronics Giant

(CBS) 
He has already unified his workforce. What Japanese executive would work the rope line at American-style town-hall meetings? And he never misses a chance to get out on the factory floor, to see and be seen.

"There are a lot of young people who say 'Go on shake it up more. Do more.' Talk to me all the time. You know, 'Fight. Get rid of that crust of management. Go on, fight for it,' ” Stringer explains.

Motivating young workers is the easy part; firing some of them won’t be, especially with some analysts saying his cutbacks don’t go far enough.

On the day of the announcement, Stringer got a tepid, if not negative response from Wall Street.

"I think that the tepid response from Wall Street is because Wall Street now always wants more blood than you could possibly deliver," says Stringer.

Still, Sony simply has to change. Profit margins for many consumer products have disappeared, its movie studio is in a slump again — "Memoirs of a Geisha,” which Sony hoped would be holiday season hit, flopped instead — and the music division has a scandal over anti-piracy software it secretly planted on CDs. It seems there’s trouble wherever you look.

"For Sony, they have always been a Yokozuna," says Takeuchi. "Yokozuna is a sumo wrestler who’s the highest grand champion. … "They’ve always been at the top. They’ve always been a rule maker rather than a rule-breaker. Now they have to become a rule-breaker. And that’s going to be tough to do."

Rule-breaking means being bold and innovative. And in electronics, they think they’re on the way. Their Bravia flat-screen TV is a big hit. They hope the new digital Walkman will be just as cool as the iPod and a lot is also riding on the upcoming PlayStation 3.

To tout all his new products, Stringer is in perpetual motion around the world, on the red carpet in Hollywood, in black-tie in New York and at a new Sony facility in India, for example.

Asked what his travel schedule is for the next couple of days, Stringer says, "Well, I go to Los Angeles on Sunday for a movie premiere. I go back to New York on Monday night. I go to Japan on Saturday. … "I then come back to London, go back to London on Thursday, back to New York on the following Monday."

He is in a constant jet lag. "Seven hours sleep is tantamount to a miracle. I celebrate it," he says.

Stringer sees his wife, Jennifer, a doctor, and their two children, a 13-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter, just a few days a month.

His family lives in the English countryside, and Stringer said during a factory town hall meeting, "I don’t see my family very much. My family is you."

Stringer admits there was a sadness in his voice. "This is a tale repeated around the world with all of these globe-trotting business executives. You don’t know quite what I’m inflicting on my children. And so I overcompensate when I’m around them and I tend to walk in with bundles of Sony devices as a sort of social bribery."

If he’s going to pay such an awful personal price, he doesn’t want to feel like just another cost-cutting CEO, totally transforming the company to fit the model of American industry.

Sony, he says, deserves better.

"This is not a company on its last legs. This is a company with great traditions," he says. "I have to look after some of those traditions because that’s why the company was successful in the first place. And I’m not sure that leaping on board an American business model of ruthlessness and viciousness and counter-attacks all the time is a good thing necessarily for somebody else. And, so, taking care of somebody else’s culture is part of the joy and opportunity of this job. I have things to learn from the Japanese. And not just the other way around."