It's one of the oldest jokes there is, points out Sir Howard Stringer, chairman and chief executive of Sony (NYSE: SNE - News) : "How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice."

However, for the 106 members of the Sony Philharmonic Orchestra who take the stage at New York's premier concert hall , corporate symbolism and executive networking were important too.

The amateur Tokyo orchestra's journey to a sold out performance at one of classical music's hallowed halls began with Sir Howard's dilemma about how to get his message of change across to the company. When the Welsh-born American was picked to run the Japanese electronics and media group in 2005, he saw that the need for collaboration across its divisions was urgent if the maker of Walkman phones, Bravia televisions and Cybershot cameras was to rebuild market share in the digital age.

In spite of his rallying cry of "Sony United", the silos proved hard to dismantle. But when he attended a performance of the Sony orchestra in Tokyo he found something to embody his message: "Here they were, right in front of me, engineers from all of the company bound together only by their talent in music. If they managed to collaborate, why couldn't the organisation?" he says, speaking in his Madison Avenue office.

Sir Howard, a talented boyhood musician, took the orchestra under his wing. Such executive attention was not without precedent. The orchestra was founded in 1995 by Norio Ohga, a former opera singer who was Sony's president, chief executive and then chairman in the 1980s and 1990s. Sir Howard's predecessor had conducted professional orchestras overseas and likened the job of company leader to that of a conductor, who brings out the best from diverse individuals.

The notion of the executive as maestro has become a common leadership metaphor: the Gewandhaus orchestra runs "Management Symphony" performances for German executives, while Benjamin Zander, music director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra is a regular speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

On being invited on to the board of Carnegie Hall last year, Sir Howard cajoled Clive Gillenson, its executive director, into hosting tomorrow's programme of Dvorák, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky.

Through contacts with Columbia Artist Management he secured the services of Daniel Harding, principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Yo Yo Ma, cellist and Sony BMG artist.

When Sir Howard announced at Sony's management conference that the orchestra would be performing outside Japan, "I did not use it shamelessly, I wanted the symbolism to be self-evident," he says. The effect was swift, however. "We had a lot of calls and e-mails from people wanting to be members," says Kanichi Yoda, the orchestra's general manager.

More than 60 per cent of the orchestra's members are engineers, working on PlayStation 3 applications, Blu-Ray high-definition player components and OLED televisions.

Realising that contacts made after orchestra rehearsals have led to collaborations on noise cancelling headphones and home theatre amplifiers, Sir Howard wants to repeat the exercise in other corners of Sony.

A cocktail party he hosted for 100 software engineers has spawned meetings at which colleagues working for different product groups create applications on weekends, he says, and last month he brought 25 people from around Sony's television group together for dinner to spark similar discussions: "They recognise we are stronger together than we are separated. I don't need to beat it over the head."

Speaking on another bad day for global markets, Sir Howard drily admits that his focus on the concert - when he will be sitting in the stalls - is "not necessarily perfect timing," but says: "It will make a point about Sony, that we can still be matchless."