Akio Morita Quotes

We made a completely new kind of transistor (the NPN BJT, and in our development work, our researcher, Leo Esaki, demonstrated the electron tunneling effect, which led to the development of the tunnel diode for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize seventeen years later, after he had joined IBM.

I often say to my assistants, "Never trust anybody," but what I mean is that you should never trust someone else to do a job exactly the way you would want it done.

I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

...the remarkable thing about management is that a manager can go on for years making mistakes that nobody is aware of, which means that management can be a kind of a con job.

To gain profit is important, but you must invest to build up assets that you can cash in in the future.

Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.

Of course we have to make a profit, but we have to make a profit over the long haul, not just the short term, and that means we must keep investing in research and development - it has run consistently about 6 percent of sales at Sony - and in service.

In the United States businessmen often do not trust their colleagues. If you trust your colleague today, he may be your competitor tomorrow, because people frequently move from one company to another.

The effect of three things - the new laws, the revision of the tax system, and the elimination of the zaibatsu conglomerates - was to make Japan an egalitarian society for the first time.

What we in industry learned in dealing with people is that people do not work just for money and that if you are trying to motivate, money is not the most effective tool.

I have had my difficulties with the American legal system, and so I feel qualified to talk about it.

...if you are nothing but profit-conscious, you cannot see the opportunities ahead.

...I established the rule that once we hire an employee, his school records are a matter of the past and are no longer used to evaluate his work or decide on his promotion.