During his years as president of PlayStation, Kaz Hirai was famously memed for his role in the brand’s disastrous 2006 E3 conference, where he appeared to be taking a pretty casual approach to the task of leading the company. Far from being just a public persona, it appears this attitude was one he maintained behind the scenes, as he recently shared during an interview about his time leading Sony’s gaming division.
The interview conducted by business publication Nikkei X Trend in Japan saw Hirai interviewed alongside Toridoll CEO Takaya Awata, and centered on their management philosophies., Hirai shared anecdotes about the ways in which he drove the company based on his own knowledge of the games industry. At times during meetings with Sony executives outside of gaming, they would offer recommendations for which direction PlayStation should take as a brand. “When I was president of Sony Computer Entertainment handling PlayStation’s console business, whenever [then-Sony CEO] Howard Stringer or other executives would come in to recommend things, I’d go my own direction,” Hirai recalled. “What headquarters says isn’t important. We’re PlayStation!”
Hirai continued to follow his own instincts with the PlayStation brand throughout his time leading the division, in the end forming a strong relationship with Stringer. When Stringer stepped down in 2012, Hirai was promoted to CEO, something he says put him under a lot of pressure to steer the ship, not just for Sony’s game division as it prepared to launch the PS4, but for the entire company.
At the time, Sony had posted their worst net-loss ever, causing a loss of confidence within the company. Meanwhile, some were nervous about Hirai’s appointment because, as he puts it, “one article even claimed, ‘Kazuo Hirai, who only knows about gaming and music, was handpicked to be the new president at the young age of 51 only because Howard Stringer, who only spoke English, liked him [for being] the only person under him to understand his jokes.’”
His first task in the role was to reassure people. “Everyone was worried about things like, ‘I don’t know if he’ll pull the ladder out from under me,’ or ‘is he the sort of person who would take credit for the successes and blame others for the failures?’”, he explains. “If I couldn’t earn people’s respect, we could never work hard together. So I started by making sure they knew I was someone they could trust.”
This involved him making trips to various departments unannounced and speaking directly with them. One lesson he learned as CEO, however, was to no longer have departments follow their own whims the way he once did at PlayStation. Instead, he sought to create a defining goal for the company, to create moving experiences, and drive that through all departments, gaming or otherwise.
Hirai eventually stepped down as CEO in 2019, serving as an advisor to the company until 2024. And though that E3 appearance may be infamous, it was during his time at PlayStation that the company launched the PS3 and turned the hardware’s fortunes around after an initially bumpy launch.