Kurt Andersen

I’m friendly with Howard Stringer (singificant bits of him went into the media-mogul character Harold Mose in my novel Turn of the Century), and today’s long, front-page Wall Street Journal piece about his difficulties running Sony made me sigh sympathetically.

I like Howard because he’s genuinely funny and naturally candid and impolitic, virtues rarely-to-never present in big-time CEOs. His quotes in the Journal piece were true to form.

About the massive recall last year of Sony notebook computer batteries that tended to overheat dangerously, he said the company’s response to the problem “took too long for bizarre Japanese reasons that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life discussing.”

And about complaints by Japanese that he lives in a hotel when he’s there: “I have a home in England and I have a home in New York — I’m already bloody cross-cultural — and I just didn’t want to be in a lonely apartment somewhere in Tokyo even for symbolic reasons.” He should’ve “faked it better — I mean that seriously….I should’ve put the flag up the flagpole and said here’s my residence in downtown Tokyo — I’m here! — even if it’s less practical than living where I live, and much less comfortable and friendly.”

A little more than a decade ago we had lunch, at the Four Seasons in New York, at an interesting crossroads moment in his life. His misguidedly ahead-of-its-time company TeleTV had shut down. He was unemployed, and charmingly at sea. He told me he was thinking about becoming a writer, that he had a sitcom in mind he wanted to develop. I was enthusiastic, in favor of 90-degree career turns on principle.

Not long afterward I was fired from my job as editor-in-chief of New York, and started writing novels. And not many months after that Howard re-enlisted in the executive corps, becoming president of Sony America. I know I made the right decision, and whenever I read about the fresh corporate hells in which Howard finds himself, I always wonder if he thinks he did.