85 quotes found
"We tell our young managers: 'Don't be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don't make the same mistake twice'."
"More people are interested in trying to shuffle paper assets around than building lasting assets by producing real goods."
"Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things."
"A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management."
"There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies."
"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."
"The effect of three things - the new laws, the revision of the tax system, and the elimination of the zaibatsu conglomerates - was to make Japan an egalitarian society for the first time."
"'There is a major difference between you and me,' I told him. 'Yes, I am rich. But you are wealthy. And that is why you can buy such (expensive jewelry (for your wife and why I cannot.'"
"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."
"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."
"The investor and the employee are in the same position, but sometimes the employee is more important, because he will be there a long time whereas an investor will often get in and out on a whim in order to make a profit."
"We want to keep the company healthy and its employees happy, and we want to keep them on the job and productive."
"...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."
"I believe one of the reasons we went through such a remarkable growth period was that we had this atmosphere of free discussion."
"I have always made it a point to know our employees, to visit every facility of our company, and to try to meet and know every single employee."
"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."
"In all my years in business I can recall very few people I have wanted to fire for making mistakes."
"...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."
"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."
"To gain profit is important, but you must invest to build up assets that you can cash in in the future."
"...if you are nothing but profit-conscious, you cannot see the opportunities ahead."
"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."
"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 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."
"...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."
"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."
"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."
"(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."
"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."
"Only with these three kinds of creativity - technology, product planning, and marketing - can the public receive the benefit of a new technology."
"...without an organisation that can work together, sometimes over a very long period, it's difficult to see new projects to fruition."
""While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers." '"
"...if you have so many lawyers, they have to find business, which sometimes they have to create. Sometimes nonsensical lawsuits are generated by lawyers. In this country (the United States everybody sues everybody."
"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."
"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 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 differences between U.S. and Japanese companies go beyond the cultural."
"Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan."
"We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices."
"Japanese attitudes toward work seem to be critically different from American attitudes."
"..I believe it is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for his work. People need money, but they also want to be happy in their work and proud of it."
"I believe people work for satisfaction."
"...the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers."
"You can be totally rational with a machine. But if you work with people, sometimes logic often has to take a backseat to understanding."
"No matter how deep a study you make. What you really have to rely on is your own intuition and when it comes down to it, you really don't know what's going to happen until you do it."
"When it rains, you put up an umbrella. That is the secret of success in business and management."
"Our social mission as a manufacturer is only realized when products reach, are used by, and satisfy the customer... We need to take the customer's skin temperature daily."
"In order to do a good job a person must like what he or she is doing... If you do things just because you have to, then you will never enjoy work. Nor will you do a good job if you do it simply out of a sense of duty. Stress is often a by-product of such passive or negative attitudes toward work. Paradoxically as it may sound, love of work can be the best medicine for workaholism."
"The untrapped mind is open enough to see many possibilities, humble enough to learn from anyone and anything, forbearing enough to forgive all, perceptive enough to see things as they really are, and reasonable enough to judge their true value."
"Recognizing our responsibilities as industrialists, we will devote ourselves to the progress and development of society and the well-being of people through our business activities, thereby enhancing the quality of life throughout the world."
"It is a kind of law of nature. The goal one aims for can rarely be reached by a direct road."
"Sometimes the proposals are good; but one must be cautious of tempting offers that may not derive from the best intentions."
"In business as well, if you are to be successful you must always win. An enterprise will grow in accordance with the amount of effort you plow into it."
"If it does not grow, even though you are working hard, it is not because of unfavorable circumstances, bad timing, or bad luck. ... of the past has shown, it is during the bad times that the skilled manager lays firm foundations for future growth."
"I underlined my conviction that running a business and managing an enterprise were not merely a private concern but a public endeavor."
"Matsushita Konosuke is known in Japan as the ‘god of management’. From an impoverished background, he founded a small electronics business and built this into a global corporation, becoming Japan’s richest man. His philosophy of management, based around the concept of ‘peace through prosperity’ included such concepts as low-priced, mass-produced consumer goods to enhance the quality of everyday living, mutual support and respect between the corporation and its employees, and close relations with distributors and customers. His ideas were widely admired and imitated in Japan, and in the 1980s became popular in the USA and Europe as well."
"In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge."
"As for the epistemological dimension, we draw on Michael Polanyi's (1966) distinction between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is personal, context-specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate. Explicit or "codified" knowledge, on the other hand, refers to knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language."
"Any organization that deals with a changing environment ought not only to process information efficiently, but also create information and knowledge."
"In the act of creating, people argue. They have heated dialogue. They get upset! Without real exchange, you can’t create knowledge. Knowledge creation is a human activity"
"Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don’t understand how human beings learn and create... Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional “inputs” into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. “It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another."
"Why is ultimately a question of purpose: Why do we exist? In most organizations, people are not encouraged to keep asking questions."
"Ikujiro Nonaka and his co-workers created a consistent body of theory concerning knowledge creation in organizations based on four main ideas:"
"In Japan, organizations and people in the organization are synonymous."
"Rowing harder doesn't help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction."
"Analysis is the critical starting point of strategic thinking. Faced with problems, trends, events, or situations that appear to constitute a harmonious whole or come packaged as a whole by common sense of the day, the strategic thinker dissects them into their constituent parts. Then, having discovered the significance of these constituents, he reassembles them in a way calculated to maximize his advantage."
"In business as on the battlefield, the object of strategy is to bring about the conditions most favorable to one's own side, judging precisely the right moment to attack or withdraw and always assessing the limits of compromise correctly. Besides the habit of analysis, what marks the mind of the strategist is an intellectual elasticity or flexibility that enables him to come up with realistic responses to changing situations, not simply to discriminate with great precision among different shades of gray."
"Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors. Corporate strategy, thus, implies an attempt to alter a company's strength relative to that of its competitors in the most efficient way."
"The strategist's method is very simply to challenge the prevailing assumptions with a single question: Why? And to put the same question relentlessly to those responsibles for the current way of doing things until they are sick of it."
"In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way. Phenomena and events in the real word do not always fit a linear model. Hence the most reliable means of dissecting a situation into its constituent parts and reassembling then in the desired pattern is not a step-by-step methodology such as systems analysis. Rather, it is that ultimate nonlinear thinking tool, the human brain. True strategic thinking thus contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis... No matter how difficult or unprecedented the problem, a breakthrough to the best possible solution can come only from a combination of rational analysis, based on the real nature of things, and imaginative reintegration of all the different items into a new pattern, using nonlinear brainpower. This is always the most effective approach to devising strategies for dealing successfully with challenges and opportunities, in the market arena as on the battlefield."
"In practice, the managerial decision to tackle organizational and systems changes is made even more difficult by the way in which problems become visible. Usually a global systems problem first comes into view in the form of local symptoms. Rarely do such problems show up where the real underlying causes are."
"Top managers are always slow to point the finger of responsibility at headquarters or at themselves. When global faults have local symptoms, they will be slower still. When taking corrective action means a full, zero-based review of all systems, skills and structures, their speed will decrease even further. And when their commitment to acting globally is itself far from complete, any motion is unlikely."
"It is hard to let old beliefs go. They are familiar. We are comfortable with them and have spent years building systems and developing habits that depend on them. Like a man who has worn eyeglasses so long that he forgets he has them on, we forget that the world looks to us the way it does because we have become used to seeing it that way through a particular set of lenses. Today, however, we need new lenses. And we need to throw the old ones away."
"TQM is focused on everyone's satisfaction. TQM is an unyielding, continuing, improving effort by everyone in the company to understand, meet, and exceed the expectations of customers. TQM is not just a quality control program."
"As Uchimaru sees things, an engineer who doesn't think TQM applies to technical activities must not understand either engineering or TQM or both. TQM is the application of the scientific method to business (pick an important problem, get the facts, analyze the facts, find the underlying truth, plan a method of improvement based on the underlying truth, systematically test it to verify that it works, standardize the new method, and then the cycle around again)"
"The great quality teacher, Shoji Shiba, often tells people that the biggest barrier to changing understanding is the following word: IAKI, which is not a Japanese word at all. It is an acronym for I ALREADY KNOW IT... Professor Shiba then goes on to say: “Yes, you may know it, but you don't know how to do it!” There is an enormous difference between knowledge and know-how... Too many executives believe that if they listen to a lecture or read a book they will know how to do something....Nobody ever became a great lover by just reading a book or watching a video. You have to get in and do it. There are some things you can only learn through experience."
"The fact must be expressed as data, but there is a problem in that the correct data is difficult to catch. So that I always say "When you see the data, doubt it!" "When you see the measurement instrument, doubt it! ... For example, if the methods such as sampling, measurement, testing and chemical analysis methods were incorrect, data ... to measure true characteristics and in an unavoidable case, using statistical sensory test and express them as data."
"90 percent of all problems can be solved by using the techniques of data stratification, histograms, and control charts. Among the causes of nonconformance, only one-fifth or less are attributable to the workers."
"In management, the first concern of the company is the happiness of people who are connected with it. If the people do not feel happy and cannot be made happy, that company does not deserve to exist... The first order of business is to let the employees have adequate income. Their humanity must be respected, and they must be given an opportunity to enjoy their work and lead a happy life."
"Ishikawa, one of the most famous experts of quality control, mentions the following six points as the unique characteristics of Japanese quality control: CWQC, education and training for quality control, quality control circle, nationwide promotion activities 16 valuation system of quality control, and utilization of statistical skills..."
"There is so much to be learned by studying how Dr. Ishikawa managed to accomplish so much during a single lifetime. In my observation, he did so by applying his natural gifts in an exemplary way. He was dedicated to serving society rather than serving himself. His manner was modest, and this elicited the cooperation of others. He followed his own teachings by securing facts and subjecting them to rigorous analysis. He was completely sincere, and as a result was trusted completely."
"[ Total Quality Management (TQM) is] a term first used to describe a management approach to quality improvement. Since then, TQM has taken on many meanings. Simply put, it is a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction. TQM is based on all members of an organization participating in improving processes, products, services and the culture in which they work. The methods for implementing this approach are found in the teachings of such quality leaders as Philip B. Crosby, W. Edwards Deming, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Kaoru Ishikawa and Joseph M. Juran."