Akio Morita Quotes

I don't think value to the customer is achieved at the expense of employees' welfare.

Our goal isn't to close Wal-Mart down. It is to make it a better, more humane company toward its employees and the communities it is in.

You really should not do this job unless you're willing to put in that enormous amount of effort. You should not do the job unless you're willing to take risks. And you shouldn't do the job unless you're willing to lose the job, too.

In an economic recession, naturally, when you ask people to list their priorities, they're going to place a higher priority on the immediate economic situation.

Since when do corporations not have responsibility to the community? Since when to the not have responsibility to their employees?

I make all my advertising decisions based on what is best for my customers and my employees.

Growing up, we were a poor yet tightknit family. My mother worked multiple jobs and always made sure that her kids never had to want for anything.

When we exited the textiles business, we paid our bankers and labourers. We must have been the only company to do that.

Compassion, together with contractual responsibility for one's workforce, is a mark of a top employer.

I have people coming to me with endorsements all the time. I've turned down endorsements well over $1 million because I didn't like the company.

My cousin in Louisiana started a small company with a little savings, renovating houses. A single mom, she saved enough to buy a home and provide child care for her son. When the economy went belly up, so did her company. She was forced to sell her home and move in with her parents.

It is imperative that we set the national example and make it clear that companies seeking to do business in New York City cannot be allowed to treat their workers like second-class citizens.

If you want to play, you gotta pay.

At some point, you can't take a risk just to take a risk because that's a betrayal, in and of itself.

If in fact the rates go up because the president refuses to budge then he will have to answer for that next year when our economy is not growing. When, unfortunately, people lose their jobs who work at a dental clinic as a medical billing specialist, or the paralegal at a law firm loses their job, or the courier at the law firm loses a job, these are not millionaires and billionaires.

Now he realized the truth: that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power - to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin - the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair...Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

The unhappy theory of business ethics is this: you have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit. Period. To do anything other than that is to cheat your investors. And in a competitive world, you don't have much wiggle room here.

We need government and business to work together for the benefit of everyone. It should no longer be just about typical "corporate social responsibility" where the "responsibility" bit is usually the realm of a small team buried in a basement office - now it should be about every single person in a business taking responsibility to make a difference in everything they do, at work and in their personal lives.

When we see companies who are in complicit relationships with China, for example, making huge profits by providing China with the very software that enables the state to censor its own people, that is not acceptable. We need to engage with such companies to make their responsibilities clear.

Posts of honor are evermore posts of danger and of care.

The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed

Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.

It's an unbelievable responsibility to influence decisions, shareholder value and most important to me, people's careers and livelihoods.

A company and leaders of the company have the responsibility of the precious lives of all the human beings that work there.

A leader must be ready to send the soldiers under his command to their deaths