Akio Morita

Morita started Sony with Masaru Ibuka in a bombed-out Tokyo department store in 1946, and Made in Japan is his account of turning that into a company that sold to America on its own terms instead of as somebody's supplier. He wrote it with Edwin M. Reingold and Mitsuko Shimomura. The unusual arguments are all here: that a brand is worth more than a contract, that he moved his family to New York to find out what Americans actually wanted, and that the Walkman went ahead over the objections of his own marketing people, who were certain nobody would buy a tape player that could not record.