Akio Morita (1921 – 1999)
Japanese businessman and co-founder of Sony Corporation.
...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.
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 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.
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 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.
You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.
In all my years in business I can recall very few people I have wanted to fire for making mistakes.
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.
...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.
Only with these three kinds of creativity - technology, product planning, and marketing - can the public receive the benefit of a new technology.
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.
...if you are nothing but profit-conscious, you cannot see the opportunities ahead.
A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.
"While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers." '
I believe people work for satisfaction.
More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.
...the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers.