“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.”

If you trust your colleague today, he may be your competitor tomorrow, because people frequently move from one company to another.

To create a familylike feeling within the corporation, a feeling that employees and managers share the same fate.

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.

It’s difficult to see new projects to fruition.

(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.

It has run consistently about 6 percent of sales at Sony – and in service.

Americans make money by playing `money games,’ namely mergers, acquisitions, by simply moving money back and forth … instead of creating and producing goods with some actual value.

Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want.

Executives of the company must have the necessary qualities to direct the personnel by showing them the way to do things.

Curiosity is the key to creativity.

You can be totally rational with a machine.

Employees are not guilty; why should they suffer?

I feel it is my fault because I made the decision to hire him.

If we face recession, we should not lay off employees; the company should sacrifice a profit. It’s management’s risk and management’s responsibility.

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.

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

This was due to a kind of increased existential awareness that resulted from this confrontation with the death of another. And I think it brought them in touch with their own death, so they began to experience a kind of preciousness to life that comes with an experience of its transiency.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously.

And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It’s where it all began and ended.

Rock ‘n roll is really swing with a modern name. It began on the levees and plantations, took in folk songs, and features blues and rhythm.

Once I began to consider everything as being of potential interest, objects released latent layers of value.