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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
