people-from-nagoya

"[Nobunagas] place in Japanese history might be likened to the places of Thomas Cromwell in English history and Giuseppe Garibaldi in Italian history. Thomas Cromwell… was responsible for bringing about the surrender of the great religious houses to such a degree that by 1540 the monastic institutions had ceased to exist and their properties had been vested in the Crown. Cromwell eradicated the independence of the clergy and brought about their total submission to the king. It might be noted that Nobunaga left the temples in Japan with far more possessions than Cromwell left to the church in England. Giuseppe Garibaldi… brought the Papal States … under the hegemony of the central government and out from under the authority of the pope. Through the 1860s the newly unified Italian state repressed religious houses, confiscated and sold ecclesiastical properties, and seized Rome itself in 1870. Admittedly, Garibaldi's methods for attaining his end were much less violent than those employed by Nobunaga; but Garibaldi and Nobunaga lived in different countries and in different ages, and the military power of the Buddhist temples in sixteenth-century Japan was far greater than that of the Catholic church in nineteenth-century Italy… Both Cromwell and Garibaldi effected changes with respect to the religious institutions in their countries that were similar to those that Nobunaga brought about in Japan, and it is in the company of such people that Nobunaga must be ranked and judged."

"You never know where a breakthrough might occur, so please pursue various possibilities for potential research. You may not see results as quickly as you wish, but always remember to respect your ideas when you research."

"There is no promised road leading to definite results. What's important is how to keep open as many options as possible."

"We don't know where breakthroughs will come from and there is no guarantee that they will come from a popular area which is currently drawing a lot of attention. I think the natural pattern is that something new, something which no one was paying attention to before appears when there is a bottleneck. It would be a serious mistake to nip things like this in the bud."

"..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."

"...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 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."

"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."

"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."