Akio Morita Quotes

Management of an industrial company must be giving targets to the engineers constantly; that may be the most important job management has in dealing with its engineers.

"While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers." '

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

The "patron saint" of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.

A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.

...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.

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.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target. The best example of this was the Apollo project in the United States.

...if you have so many lawyers, they have to find business, which sometimes they have to create. Sometimes nonsensical lawsuits are generated by lawyers. In this country (the United States everybody sues everybody.

The investor and the employee are in the same position, but sometimes the employee is more important, because he will be there a long time whereas an investor will often get in and out on a whim in order to make a profit.

More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.

We tell our young managers: 'Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice'.

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.

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

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