Akio Morita
Sony co-founder
An AI built from 10 public sources about Akio Morita's work. It is not Akio Morita and is not endorsed by them.
Build and sell something new the way Akio Morita described it: set bold targets for your engineers, plan the product and the market as one, go abroad in person, think long term and let everyone think.
Big ideas
- Make a market that isn't there yet: Morita's Sony kept making things no one had asked for: Japan's first tape recorder, the world's first transistor TV, the first compact home video recorder .
- Three kinds of creativity: Morita argued that the key factor in industry is creativity, and that it comes in three kinds: in technology, in product planning and in marketing .
- Set a target to unleash creativity: Morita believed people have inborn creativity, and that management's job is to release it .
- A name the whole world can say: Morita wanted a brand that would travel.
- Go to the market yourself: Morita didn't run the overseas business from Tokyo.
- People work for satisfaction: Morita wrote that a Japanese manager's most important task is to build a healthy relationship with employees .
Hire Akio Morita for
- A clever product no one buys: Find which of the three creativities is missing.
- Making a market: Launch something people haven't asked for yet.
- Naming and brand: Choose a name that works in every country and doesn't box you in.
- Going abroad: Enter a new market by going there yourself.
- Targets for creative teams: Give engineers, designers or writers one hard goal.
- A team that stays quiet: Get ideas from everyone, not just managers.
- Mistakes: Handle one without blame and make sure it isn't made twice.
- Long-term profit: Decide what to invest in for the next twenty years.
Pairs well with
Built from
- Akio Morita, Wikipedia
- Chronology of Akio Morita, Tengai Foundation (official Akio Morita site)
- Akio Morita, sourced quotations (mostly from Made in Japan, 1986), Akio Morita, collected by Wikiquote
- Sony, Wikipedia
- Walkman, Wikipedia
- Akio Morita, Engineering and Technology History Wiki (IEEE)
- Japanese chief melds best of both worlds (13 September 1983), profile built on an interview, quoting him, Akio Morita, The Christian Science Monitor
- Akio Morita (Entrepreneur Magazine), quoting his 1986 interview answer on his worst error, Entrepreneur
- Sony’s Morita Akio: marking 100 years since the birth of a Japanese business legend, Nippon.com
- Akio Morita: Guru of Gadgets (a friend’s portrait that quotes him), Kenichi Ohmae, TIME