Akio Morita Quotes

I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.

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

Curiosity is the key to creativity.

A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.

But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.

If you go through life convinced that your way is always best, all the new ideas in the world will pass you by.

In the long run, no matter how good or successful you are or how clever or crafty, your business and its future are in the hands of the people you hire.

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

Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it. Don’t do market research.

We will try to create conditions where persons could come together in a spirit of teamwork, and exercise to their heart's desire their technological capacity.

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.

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.

Never break another man's rice bowl.

The public does not know what is possible. We do.

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.

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.

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.

All you need is the best product in the world, the most efficient production in the world and global marketing.

If we face recession, we should not lay off employees; the company should sacrifice a profit. It's management's risk and management's responsibility. Employees are not guilty; why should they suffer?

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.

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.

My chief job is to constantly stir or rekindle the curiosity of people that gets driven out by bureaucracy and formal schooling systems.

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.

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

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.

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

I consider it my job to nurture the creativity of the people I work with because at Sony we know that a terrific idea is more likely to happen in an open, free and trusting atmosphere than when everything is calculated, every action analysed and every responsibility assigned by an organisation chart.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

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

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.

The important thing in my view is not to pin the blame for a mistake on somebody, but rather to find out what caused the mistake.

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

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.

More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.

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.

When I find an employee who turns out to be wrong for the job, I feel it is my fault because I made the decision to hire him.

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

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.

(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.

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 people tend to be much better adjusted to the notion of work, any kind of work, as honorable.

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