The public does not know what is possible. We do.
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.
If you go through life convinced that your way is always best, all the new ideas in the world will pass you by.
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.
Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.
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.
The only sure thing is that in business there are no sure things.
Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.
More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods.
We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.
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 don’t believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.
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.