The mission works only in high-margin, IP-controlled sectors. Where Sony competes on pure hardware specs or financial utilities, Kando is either ignored or cynical.
While many corporate mission statements devolve into generic platitudes, Sony’s current mission—centered on the Japanese concept of Kando (“to move the heart”)—represents a unique linguistic and philosophical anomaly. This paper argues that Sony’s mission statement is not merely a public relations tool but a diagnostic lens through which to view the company’s 80-year struggle between hardware determinism and content artistry. By tracing the evolution from Akio Morita’s post-war vision to the current “Creative Entertainment Company” model, this analysis reveals that Sony’s mission succeeds as a cultural differentiator but fails as an operational guardrail. Specifically, the paper identifies a structural paradox: the mission’s emotional abstraction has historically justified both radical innovation (Walkman, PlayStation) and catastrophic siloization (Betamax, rootkit scandals). Using comparative analysis with Apple (functional clarity) and Disney (narrative specificity), this paper concludes that Sony’s mission functions best as a post-hoc justification for success rather than a predictive tool for strategy.
In corporate governance, a mission statement answers three questions: What do we do? For whom? Why does it matter? Sony’s current official mission, as articulated by CEO Kenichiro Yoshida, collapses these distinctions into a single, untranslatable Japanese word: Kando . sony's mission statement
At first glance, this is vaporware. “Emotion” is unmeasurable; “creativity” is assumed. However, this paper posits that the statement’s ambiguity is its strategic purpose. Unlike Ford (“making people’s lives better”) or Google (“organizing the world’s information”), Sony’s mission rejects operational specificity to protect a sprawling conglomerate structure—spanning gaming (PlayStation), music (Sony Music), movies (Sony Pictures), electronics (TVs/sensors), and financial services (Sony Bank). The mission’s elasticity is not a bug; it is a survival mechanism.
But the mission’s depth reveals a deeper corporate truth: Sony is no longer a technology company that makes emotions possible; it is a finance and IP company that occasionally manufactures nostalgia. Until Sony spins off its financial arm or sells its sensor division, the mission will remain what it has always been—a beautiful, untranslatable excuse for surviving without a strategy. The mission works only in high-margin, IP-controlled sectors
The Paradox of "Kando": A Deconstruction of Sony’s Mission Statement as a Strategic and Cultural Artifact
Kando (感動) is a compound of kan (feeling) and do (to move). In Japanese business culture, kando implies a sudden, involuntary emotional peak—the gasp when a song hits the right note or a game plot twists. This paper argues that Sony’s mission statement is
Investors should ignore the mission and watch cash flow from Game & Network Services (G&NS) and Music Publishing. Those are where the real kando —and profits—live.