John Nathan's definitive corporate biography of Sony, first published in 1999 and based on unprecedented access to the company, its executives, and its archives. The book traces Sony's arc from its 1946 founding in a burned-out department store through the Walkman era, the Columbia Pictures acquisition, and the tech shifts that followed. Nathan focuses on the relationship between co-founders Masaru Ibuka (the engineering visionary) and Akio Morita (the business builder), the creative tension that drove Sony's greatest innovations, and the internal struggles that accompanied its rise.
This is the most complete independent account of how Sony actually worked as an organization, written by an outsider with extraordinary insider access. Nathan captures the Ibuka-Morita partnership — the engineer who dreamed and the businessman who sold — as a case study in co-founder dynamics that every founder should study. The tension between them was productive: Ibuka would chase impossible technical goals; Morita would find a way to sell whatever Ibuka invented. But Nathan also shows how that same dynamic created blind spots, with Sony repeatedly missing market shifts because its culture celebrated technical ambition over customer feedback.
For founders, the book's greatest value is its honesty about the cost of success. Sony's early culture of risk-taking and individual initiative gave way to bureaucracy as the company grew; its willingness to cannibalize its own products faded; and the Columbia Pictures acquisition — Morita's grandest bet — became a financial anchor. Nathan does not flatten these into a narrative of decline. He presents them as the natural consequences of decisions that looked right at the time, which is exactly how a founder should think about scaling: the same culture that wins often contains the seeds of the problems that will eventually require a re-founding.