Akio Morita Quotes

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.

The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a familylike feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate.

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

I have always made it a point to know our employees, to visit every facility of our company, and to try to meet and know every single employee.

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 believe it is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for his work. People need money, but they also want to be happy in their work and proud of it.

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

In all my years in business I can recall very few people I have wanted to fire for making mistakes.

You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.

Only with these three kinds of creativity - technology, product planning, and marketing - can the public receive the benefit of a new technology.

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.

...the key factor in industry is creativity. I said there are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

The American system of management, in my opinion, also relies too much on outsiders to help make business decisions., and this is because of the insecurity that American decision makers feel in their jobs, as compared with most top Japanese corporate executives.

Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things.