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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a familylike feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate.
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.
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 "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.