Masaru Ibuka co-founded Sony with his friend, Akio Morita. As the company grew, Ibuka was considered too eccentric to be trusted with any authority so he was made “honorary chairman”, an invented position with no power.
In the mid-1970s Sony engineers created the Pressman, a miniature recorder designed for people who wanted a portable recorder.
The Pressman was initially popular with journalists who wanted to record people who were news sources but became less popular because of problems with recording.
When journalists began to reject the device, sales dropped and Sony was left with an embarrassing and expensive failure.
One day as Ibuka was wandering through a lab he heard music from a Pressman sitting on a table. An engineer explained that the device did not record well but the lab was using it to play music cassettes.
Excited, Ibuka suggested adding headphones instead of built in speakers and reinventing the device as a music player. The engineer mocked the idea and said it would never work.
Ibuka took the device, added the headphones himself, and took it to Morita, the CEO who agreed to test market the player. But the marketing department said it was a bad idea and would lose money. They launched a weak campaign that failed.
But Ibuka would not give up. He changed the marketing strategy, renamed the Pressman the Walkman, and relaunched the campaign by targeting busy young adult professionals.
The results were staggering. The first 60,000 units of the Walkman sold out in less than an hour, eventually selling 4 million units a year and revolutionizing the music industry.
Masaru Ibuka “believed in his plan” and built one of the biggest success stories in modern entertainment history.
What has God called you to do? No matter what stands in your way, always believe in God’s plan for you.
The Bible says in Proverbs 16:3, “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and He will establish your plans.” NIV
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