Vitaly Demin is a strategic branding and management professional who is currently a Senior Strategy Consultant at Eames Management Group. Vitaly joined EMG as a Associate Consultant in 2006 and worked with the company's major clients in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In addition to branding and management, Vitaly focuses on web strategy, development and design, and data analysis. He helps companies strategically integrate their brands into the online environment and position them against competition. His focus is on augmenting a website user experience through a better brand and product presentation that allows to build customer loyalty, grow sales and improve margins.

Since his start at EMG, Vitaly consulted large corporations in Russia, the Middle East, India, Europe and the US. Before, Vitaly worked in Russia for The Boston Consulting Group, Sun Microsystems and several other companies.

In 2011, together with Anton Shagaev, Vitaly co-founded a western style technology blog for Russia, GRIDDER.ru. He is deeply involved in marketing and business development of the project and also contributes articles when he has time.

Vitaly holds a Master's Degree in Languages and Intercultural Communication from an internationally accredited university in Russia and is currently enrolled in an MBA program at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis US, majoring in strategic branding and management.

This eBook is a brief insight into the core of the executive management of Sony Corporation, the core that is unfortunately filled with one of the most perilous human qualities – arrogance.

For a very long time now Sony has been known as an organization permeated by arrogant attitude toward their suppliers, their distributors and now their customers. This culture is felt everywhere in the world. I remember having meetings with Sony people in Moscow Russia when I consulted the largest electronics retailer in the country. These meetings were very adversarial and not a most pleasant experience. Also, as I worked with electronics retailers in Kuwait, Emirates, India, England, US and other countries, the opinions I received about Sony were the same. Nobody liked them and nobody wanted to do business with them because it was just too painful. Obviously, they could not stop carrying Sony products in their stores but some of them did try to reduce the assortment. Sony rarely partners. They dictate.

This work is an attempt to show how corporate arrogance affected the decisions Sony made along the way, the decisions that led to mistakes, mistakes that got them dethroned from the position of being the best and the most admired consumer electronics company in the world.

I hope this eBook helps other companies see a bigger picture of how decisions that are made inside their organizations affect their brand, their customer loyalty and profitable business growth. Very often top managers do not realize that many of wrong decisions are made not due to the lack of knowledge about the problem but due to the mentioned above human flaw – arrogance.

The 2nd edition includes financial updates from 2010 as well as other recent events associated with the Sony organization.

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