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Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.
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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.
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You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding.
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(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.
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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.
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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.
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...the differences between U.S. and Japanese companies go beyond the cultural.
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...the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers.
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Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.
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There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.
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Only with these three kinds of creativity - technology, product planning, and marketing - can the public receive the benefit of a new technology.
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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.
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Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes.
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I have had my difficulties with the American legal system, and so I feel qualified to talk about it.
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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.
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We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.
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...the key factor in industry is creativity. I said 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.
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From a management standpoint, it is very important to know how to unleash people's inborn creativity. My concept is that anybody has creative ability, but very few people know how to use it.
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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.
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A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.
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We made a completely new kind of transistor (the NPN BJT, and in our development work, our researcher, Leo Esaki, demonstrated the electron tunneling effect, which led to the development of the tunnel diode for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize seventeen years later, after he had joined IBM.
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We tell our young managers: 'Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice'.
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Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things.
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...without an organisation that can work together, sometimes over a very long period, it's difficult to see new projects to fruition.