Akio Morita Quotes - Page 2

The only sure thing is that in business there are no sure things.

If we do our best and make efforts, a peaceful and great future will become ours without fail. Whether we succeed or not depends on the strength of our resolve and the amount of our endeavor.

Americans make money by playing `money games,' namely mergers, acquisitions, by simply moving money back and forth ... instead of creating and producing goods with some actual value.

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

I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the US market, and it had to be something different, something that nobody else was making.

I established the rule that once we hire an employee, his school records are a matter of the past and are no longer used to evaluate his work or decide on his promotion.

Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want.

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

An enemy of innovation could be your own sales force.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

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

I believe people work for satisfaction.

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.

There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target.

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

If you don't want Japan to buy it, don't sell it.

We treat employees as a member of the family. If management take the risk of hiring them, we have to take the responsibility for them.

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