[LINK] "Sony's Got Bigger Problems Than North Korea"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's William Pesek makes the case that Sony has huge problems with drift and fecklessness only revealed by the North Korean hack.

"Why pick on Sony? They haven't had a hit since the Walkman." In a three-minute skit on "Saturday Night Live" over the weekend, comedian Mike Myers nailed one of the less-discussed problems to be exposed by North Korea's hack of Sony Pictures: the apparent cluelessness of top Sony brass in Tokyo.

Like the Japanese media, Sony's corporate headquarters thus far seems to view the hacking drama as mostly an American problem. When local newspapers have covered the story, they've focused on Hollywood's poor taste in lampooning North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sony executives, including CEO Kazuo Hirai, have barely commented.

In fact, the attack has exposed a disturbing lack of cyber-preparedness on Sony's part. Hirai early on recognized the sensitivity of "The Interview" -- the Seth Rogen comedy that appears to have provoked the Pyongyang regime -- even going so far as to ask for revisions to the climactic assassination scene. But since the hacking, public coordination between Los Angeles and Tokyo has been poor if not nonexistent. The controversial decision to pull the movie from theaters before release was reportedly made by the studio alone.

This internal dysfunction points to a much wider problem at Sony. No corporate name better embodies Japan's rise from the devastation of World War II. Japanese view Sony founders Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita with the same awe and affection Americans do Henry Ford or Steve Jobs. The Walkman, about which Myers's alter ego Dr. Evil joked on Saturday, changed the world and fueled a cottage industry of books heralding the coming domination of Japan Inc.

But as the company expanded -- in part with the high-profile purchase of Columbia Pictures Entertainment in 1989 -- it lost focus. Over the last two decades, executives have repeatedly put off painful restructuring and refused to shed underperforming assets. Sony's operations now sprawl from film and music studios to videogame consoles to life insurance. Tokyo's hands-off attitude toward its Hollywood studio may reflect a laudable concern for artistic freedom. It's also an acknowledgment that the company has grown too big and too disparate for any meaningful oversight from the top.