In the late 1970s, Sony's engineers knew what a good tape machine was supposed to do. It recorded. Reporters used Sony's small Pressman recorder to capture interviews, and the company's portable stereo machines were built for people who wanted to tape music as well as play it. A cassette player that could only play back, with no speaker and no record button, sounded to many people inside the company like a product with something missing. They did not think it would sell.
The idea started with Masaru Ibuka, who had co-founded the company with Akio Morita in 1946, when it was a small Tokyo firm with about 20 employees. Ibuka traveled often and liked to listen to music on long flights, but the portable stereo recorder he carried was heavy. He asked for a playback-only stereo version, built for headphones, that would be small enough to carry. Engineers led by Kozo Ohsone adapted the Pressman, removing the recording parts and the speaker and adding a stereo amplifier. Ibuka brought the result to Morita.
Morita was Sony's chairman, the half of the partnership who handled the business while Ibuka led engineering. He did not see a travel gadget for executives. He saw his own children and their friends, who played music from morning until night, and young people carrying large stereos to beaches and parks. He believed they would want music that went everywhere with them and did not disturb anyone else. He pushed to turn Ibuka's personal request into a consumer product, and he wanted it ready quickly.
The resistance was real. Sony's engineering department opposed a tape player without a recording function, believing it would not sell. Morita did not ask for a vote. He committed to it and, according to later accounts, said he would resign if Sony could not sell 30,000 of them. He then ordered an initial run of 30,000 units, roughly double the monthly sales of Japan's best-selling tape recorder at the time. That was a large bet for a product category that did not yet exist.
He also saw what would make it work. The heavy headphones of the day would have ruined the idea, so the Walkman launched with very light headphones weighing about 50 grams, small enough to wear while walking. The first model, the TPS-L2, was a blue-and-silver metal player that weighed about 14 ounces and ran on AA batteries. It was priced at 33,000 yen, around $150, and marketed toward young people, with an emphasis on youth, energy and fashion rather than technical specifications.
The launch on July 1, 1979, did not go smoothly at first. Sales in the first weeks were slow. Sony responded by putting the product where people could see it, with employees wearing and demonstrating Walkmans in public so that headphones on a train or a sidewalk began to look normal. Within about two months, the first run of 30,000 had sold out, far ahead of the company's own forecast of roughly 5,000 a month.
Morita did not get everything right, and that is part of the story. He believed it would be rude for one person to listen to music alone, so the first Walkman had two headphone jacks and a "hotline" button with a small microphone that let two listeners talk over the music. Buyers mostly wanted to listen by themselves, and Sony later dropped those features. He also had to deal with names. Sony sold the player as the Soundabout in the United States, the Stowaway in Britain and the Freestyle in Sweden. Morita eventually unified it worldwide under the name Walkman.
The result changed how people experienced music. By March 1999, Sony had sold 186 million cassette Walkmans, and the cassette line was not discontinued until 2010. The word walkman entered major dictionaries. Morita died in October 1999, by then one of the best-known business leaders in the world.
It is tempting to read this as a story about ignoring the experts. It is more precise to say Morita listened to a different set of people. His engineers were listening to what the product category had always been. Morita was watching how actual people, his own children included, were living. He trusted that evidence more than the internal consensus, and he put his own job on the line to prove it.
He also kept listening after the launch. When sales were slow, he did not blame the customer. He changed how people encountered the product. When the second jack and the hotline went unused, Sony let them go. When the regional names confused the brand, he changed them. Vision got the Walkman started. Listening is what made it last.
On Monday, step away from your reports and go watch the people you serve. Sit at the front counter, ride along on a delivery or listen in on calls. Look for what they are already trying to do with the tools they have. If your team says an idea will fail, ask whether they are describing the customer or describing the way things have always been done.
Then, when you have seen enough to believe, commit to it in a way people can measure, and stay honest enough to drop the parts that don't work. Morita's engineers were right that the Walkman was missing something. They were wrong about whether anyone would care. The customer had already told him the answer. He was the one who was watching.