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.

...without an organisation that can work together, sometimes over a very long period, it's difficult to see new projects to fruition.

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

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.

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

The important thing in my view is not to pin the blame for a mistake on somebody, but rather to find out what caused the mistake.

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

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.

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

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.

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

...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.

(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.