“When I find an employee who turns out to be wrong for the job,”

There is no secret ingredient or hidden formula responsible for the success of the best Japanese companies.

We want everybody to have the best facilities in which to work, but we do not believe in posh and impressive private offices.

If management take the risk of hiring them, we have to take the responsibility for them.

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.

We don’t believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

My solution to the problem of unleashing creativity is always to set up a target.

If we do our best and make efforts, a peaceful and great future will become ours without fail.

I believe it is a big mistake to think that money is the only way to compensate a person for his work.

A company will get nowhere if all of the thinking is left to management.

We want to keep the company healthy and its employees happy, and we want to keep them on the job and productive.

To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business.

Amenities are not of great concern to management in Japan.

I knew we needed a weapon to break through to the US market, and it had to be something different, something that nobody else was making.

Once you have a staff of prepared, intelligent, and energetic people, the next step is to motivate them to be creative.

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.

While the United States has been busy creating lawyers, we have been busier creating engineers.

It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.

Your employees are your company’s real competitive advantage. They’re the ones making the magic happen-so long as their needs are being met.

Take our 20 best people away, and I will tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company.

A leader should have higher grit and tenacity, and be able to endure what the employees can’t.

Success and profitability are outcomes of focusing on customers and employees, not objectives.

If you take care of your workers they’ll take care of your business.

If you look for the best in your employees, they’ll flourish. If you criticize or look for the worst, they’ll shrivel up. We all need lots of watering.

A leader should be a visionary and have more foresight than an employee.