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.
We tell our young managers: 'Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice.
In all my years in business I can recall very few people I have wanted to fire for making mistakes.
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.
What we in industry learned in dealing with people is that people do not work just for money and that if you are trying to motivate, money is not the most effective tool.
Advertising and promotion alone will not sustain a bad product or a product that is not right for the times.
Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.
The concept of lifetime employment arose when Japanese managers and employees both realized that they had much in common and that they had to make some long-range plans.
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.
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.
I have had my difficulties with the American legal system, and so I feel qualified to talk about 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.
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.
A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.
We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.
I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion.
There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.
You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.
