Akio Morita (1921 – 1999)
Japanese businessman and co-founder of Sony Corporation.
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.
...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.
What we in industry learned in dealing with people is that people do not work just for money and that if you are trying to motivate, money is not the most effective tool.
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 differences between U.S. and Japanese companies go beyond the cultural.
Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.
..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.
I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.
Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.
There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.
...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.
...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.
Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things.
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.
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.
To gain profit is important, but you must invest to build up assets that you can cash in in the future.
We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.
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.