Akio Morita Quotes

...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.

Advertising and promotion alone will not sustain a bad product or a product that is not right for the times.

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.

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

...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.

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.

The concept of lifetime employment arose when Japanese managers and employees both realized that they had much in common and that they had to make some long-range plans.

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.

We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.

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

...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.

(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.

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

..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.

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