Akio Morita

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Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.
- Akio Morita
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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.
- Akio Morita
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Running
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If you go through life convinced that your way is always best, all the new ideas in the world will pass you by.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Leadership
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Curiosity is the key to creativity.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Graduation
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I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Believe
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Mistake
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A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Thinking
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Mistake
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You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.
- Akio Morita
Collection: People
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Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Intelligent
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Never break another man's rice bowl.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Men
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America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Japan
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But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Mistake
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My chief job is to constantly stir or rekindle the curiosity of people that gets driven out by bureaucracy and formal schooling systems.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Education
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The public does not know what is possible. We do.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Business
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Creativity
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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?
- Akio Morita
Collection: Responsibility
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To gain profit is important, but you must invest to build up assets that you can cash in in the future.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Important
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: People
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Country
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Advertising and promotion alone will not sustain a bad product or a product that is not right for the times.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Advertising
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Trying
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All you need is the best product in the world, the most efficient production in the world and global marketing.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Marketing
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The only sure thing is that in business there are no sure things.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Business
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Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Want
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Children
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More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Real
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Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Japan
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Japanese people tend to be much better adjusted to the notion of work, any kind of work, as honorable.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Work
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Jobs
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(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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Believe
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Jobs
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Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Leadership
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Effort
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: School
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The company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Fate
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While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Creating
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An enemy of innovation could be your own sales force.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Business
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Break Through
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Moving
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Moving
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Creativity
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Jobs
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Creativity
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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.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Jobs
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We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Believe
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We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Believe
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I believe people work for satisfaction.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Believe
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There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.
- Akio Morita
Collection: Secret