STRINGER'S WAY.(Sir Howard Stringer)(Interview)

In an era of brazen executive overcompensation, Sir Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Corporation, does all right for himself yet manages to lag tastefully behind most other C.E.O.s. So it appears, anyway. The tradition of lifetime employment in Japan has kept salaries there relatively modest, and perquisites like stock options, an American commonplace, are rare. Japanese securities laws do not require even a fine-print public disclosure of what the bosses take home, and Stringer, who has impeccable social skills, isn't blabbing.

He's less reticent about discussing his frequent-flier mileage balance, which presumably exceeds that of his peers. Sony owns three corporate jets, but, as often as not, Stringer flies commercial (which is not to say in the coach cabin). During a two-month sequence last fall, he spent a week in New York, four days in Tokyo, five in England, two in Boston, a day in Toronto, a day in New York, two in Beijing, one in Shanghai, two in New Delhi, two in Bombay, four in Tokyo, four in Los Angeles, one in San Jose, five in New York, three in L.A., three in New York, a week and a half in Tokyo, and the Thanksgiving holiday in England, after which he returned to New York. Total miles: 60,000. This has been his pace for more than a year, since the word went out, in March, 2005, that he would assume the top job at Sony, a development that greatly surprised the Asian and Western business press, and, for that matter, Stringer himself. Not all his friends (a global circle) were convinced that this was the best thing that could happen to him. He was sixty-three, and he had already enjoyed successful careers in journalism and the entertainment industry; money wasn't an issue; and he had a wife and two young children whom he wouldn't get to see much anymore. (Now, in his perpetually jet-lag-addled geography, a reasonable question would be: Where is home?)

One afternoon last fall, I met with Stringer in a corner office on the sixth floor of a nondescript modern eight-story building in Tokyo's Shinagawa ward, a residential and commercial area where one of Sony's first factories was built, almost sixty years ago. Nothing about the office decor--gray carpeting, black Aeron chairs, yucca palm, tchotchke-free desk, framed posters promoting Sony's online music service--revealed anything about the occupant. A glass wall made Stringer visible to an adjacent roomful of accountants and financial planners, and the door, I gathered, was usually open.

Our conversation took place only days before "Memoirs of a Geisha," Sony Pictures Entertainment's pull-out-the-stops holiday-season release, was to have splashy premieres in, consecutively, Tokyo, Los Angeles, and New York. (The film was a critical and financial disappointment.) Privately, a few of Sony Corporation's Japanese senior executives had expressed disbelief that a Hollywood studio--no matter who owned it--could get the cultural details of the story right. That Chinese actors had been cast in several starring roles didn't arouse confidence, either.

A naturalized U.S. citizen, Stringer was born in Wales. "I told the executives, 'No, you'll find flaws in it, it's a Western interpretation. But it has value, because the world is flat,' " he said to me. "I grew up seeing American actors play Robin Hood or Ivanhoe or Rob Roy. When John Ford made 'How Green Was My Valley,' the actors were not Welsh." In what passes for Stringer-style heavy-handedness, he'd insisted that some of the doubters attend the Los Angeles gala.

"I've told them, 'Come on, we're all one company,' " he said. "They'll be on the red carpet, and we've agreed that, if the press asks, they have to say they like the picture."

A close friend of Stringer's, the novelist Avery Corman, said recently, "Howard's a guy who wears his business success very easily. He's not a person who will suck the air out of the room. I've watched a lot of sports with him. We're both long-standing--I mean long-suffering--New York Giants fans. I believe that Howard is among those people who understand that things can always go wrong and will. I assume he approaches business with the same bemused, wry skepticism."