Akio Morita Quotes

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

From a management standpoint, it is very important to know how to unleash people's inborn creativity. My concept is that anybody has creative ability, but very few people know how to use it.

...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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

To gain profit is important, but you must invest to build up assets that you can cash in in the future.

Of course we have to make a profit, but we have to make a profit over the long haul, not just the short term, and that means we must keep investing in research and development - it has run consistently about 6 percent of sales at Sony - and in service.

...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.