AKIO MORITA

Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.

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.

The future of a Nation will be shaped by its ability to produce planes, cars, electronics ... not by how slick its financial markets can shuffle paper assets around.

Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things.

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

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

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

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

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

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.

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.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

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

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.

An enemy of innovation could be your own sales force.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

America looks 10 minutes ahead; Japan looks 10 years.

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

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.

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