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.

(Japanese Government believes that if you have a big laboratory with all the latest equipment and good funding it will automatically lead to creativity. It doesn't work that way.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

...the differences between U.S. and Japanese companies go beyond the cultural.

...the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers.

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

...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.

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