He turned what was once a small bombed-out department store in Tokyo
into the world’s most successful consumer electronics company. Not only
that but Akio Morita, co-founder of the Sony Corporation, was also one
of the few entrepreneurs that helped Japan’s economy recover in the
aftermath of World War II. Today, more than half a century after the
company’s initial inception, and with Morita at the helm until his only
recent departure, Sony remains one of the world’s largest media
conglomerates, with over 158,000 employees worldwide and revenues in
excess of $63 billion.
Whether it was his innate abilities or the rules he had learned, Morita was able to translate that into not only his own success, but also Japan’s. He helped put his country back on the map, while building his own reputation across the world. Indeed, in 1998, a Harris survey revealed that Sony was ranked the number one brand name by American consumers, ahead of Coca-Cola and General Electric. How did he do it?
“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.
The most important mission for a Japanese manager is to develop a healthy relationship with his employees, to create a family-like feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate. We will try to create conditions where persons could come together in a spirit of teamwork, and exercise to their heart’s desire their technological capacity.
I believe people work for satisfaction. 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.
The American system of management, in my opinion, 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.
If you go through life convinced that your way is always best, all the new ideas in the world will pass you by. Don’t be afraid to make a mistake. But make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice.
I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the U.S. market, and it had to be something different, something that nobody else was making.
The key factor in industry is creativity. 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.
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.
Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it. Don’t do market research. 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.“