Akio Morita Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

We all learn by imitating, as children, as students, as novices in the world of business. And then we grow up and learn to blend our innate abilities with the rules or principles we have learned.

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 want to keep the company healthy and its employees happy, and we want to keep them on the job and productive.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

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.

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

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

I believe people work for satisfaction.

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.

..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.