Haruki Ibuki Apr 2026

In the annals of Japanese corporate history, there are fixers, there are dreamers, and then there is Haruki Ibuki. He is the man who walked into a burning building—Sony in the early 2000s—and calmly rewired the electrical system while the walls were collapsing.

Colleagues describe a man obsessed with kankaku —a Japanese word meaning "sensory perception." While rivals crunched numbers, Ibuki listened. He famously tested prototype headphones for six months, rejecting dozens of designs until he found a bass tone that “felt like a heartbeat.” haruki ibuki

He sold Sony’s non-core semiconductor plants, merged the music and movie divisions under one digital umbrella, and—most controversially—forced the electronics division to adopt a strategy: every product had to connect to a network. No exceptions. The Legacy of the Quiet Man By 2007, Ibuki had stepped down, having handed a profitable, leaner Sony to his successor, Howard Stringer. The stock had tripled from its nadir. The PlayStation 3, though expensive, was finally profitable. And for the first time in a decade, Sony’s TVs and cameras were sharing components and software. In the annals of Japanese corporate history, there

In a 2010 lecture at Kyoto University, he explained: "A company forgets how to make people feel something. We made the Walkman because we believed music should be private, mobile, and intimate. By 2003, we were making gadgets for a catalog. I did not save Sony. I just reminded Sony what it already knew: First, move the heart. The profit follows. " He famously tested prototype headphones for six months,