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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.