“We all learn by imitating, as children, as students, as novices in the world of business.”

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.

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’ve always appreciated working with people I have chemistry with, who are friends, and where you feel that the work is growing while you are getting to know each other better.

Because we are continually growing in the Lord, preachers and lay people alike must be open to the Lord’s correction.

Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern.

Girls are taught to sing high and pretty, like Antony, not low and from the guts like Nina Simone. But we’re slowly trying to change that. There are so many things we’re not told growing up, and it’s our true feminist responsibility to take the truth to the people who need to hear it.

If you were running a solar company you may be okay – you may be able to keep growing. The question for physics is: Can you grow fast enough to begin to catch up with the damage?

You know growing up in Sweden meant we had a lot of rain when we played tennis. We were taught on clay courts but because of the weather, we had to go indoors a lot.

I lived to play basketball. Growing up as a kid, Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics were my favorite team. The way they played, the teamwork, the sacrifice, the commitment, the joy, the camaraderie, the relationship with the fans.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn’t come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards.