Sony Will Look Outside For New CEO

Howard Stinger, Sony’s current CEO, is 69 and most analysts expected him to step down in the next year. The hack of the PlayStation Network, which has happened not once but twice will speed his exit. Stringer’s probable successor, until recently, was Kazuo Hirai. He has overseen Sony’s game division, among other things, so he is more directly responsible for the debacle than Stringer.

Sony finds itself in the rare position of a company with a CEO who is no longer a viable leader and a successor who has the same problem.

Sony could recruit a new CEO from a rival Japanese company. The means its board would need to turn to a candidate from Canon, Hitachi, or Panasonic. Each has executives who have experience in the consumer electronics field. None has a background to run Sony’s film studio. That raises the question of whether Sony will spin out its content business, which does not fit with the rest of its operation.  Sony’s CEO problem, however, is immediate and a transaction which involves its studio would take months to engineer.

Sony’s best way to signal it wants to break from those responsible for past mistakes would be to get a prized leader from one of the extremely successful tech firms. The first choice might be an executive from Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), but almost all of its top management beyond successor Tim Cook have narrow tech and administration backgrounds. None has the experience it would take to run a large multinational company.

The US only has a small number of successful high tech companies which have consumer electronics and PC arms. Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) is one. Some of its senior management members are likely to want to leave after being passed over for the CEO job in favor of outsider Léo Apotheker, the bumbling former CEO of SAP.

But, Sony’s most likely path, if it can take it, would be to hire a US tech management “super star.” There are very few of those. The most attractive candidate has to be Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and its current chairman. He is as responsible as anyone for the search company’s success, but his run at Google is over as he has been moved into a ceremonial job. Nothing would cap his career better than a turnaround of what was once the premier consumer electronics firm in the world.

After Schmidt, the US list gets light. Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) do not have any executives who are standout candidates although Nokia (NYSE: NOK) took a chance on Redmond executive Stephen Elop. The markets did not seem to be impressed by that choice.

Sony has the choice of a number of executive candidates at Japanese firms who are not well-known in the US and Europe. And, a manager with a global reputation is what Sony needs. That leaves a very short list and the worse Sony’s problems get, the shorter the list becomes.

Douglas A. McIntyre