Business Sphere

image from matsushita-library.jp/en/

Have you heard, seen, or use products such as home appliances, components, or digital cameras with the brand names of Panasonic, National, Technics or Sanyo?

Those products are manufactured by a global company founded by Konosuke Matsushita. Matsushita was considered one of the greatest business leaders and managers, and one of the most original management thinkers of this century.

Matsushita personally built and led his Fortune 500 company over five decades until his death, named Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd., and on October 1, 2008 was renamed Panasonic Corporation to reflect its global brand.

Currently, Matsushita’s Panasonic Corporation employs 328,615 people worldwide, with a revenue of US $ 81.9 Billion, and ranked the 59^th largest company in the world.

Matsushita’s over-all philosophy was founded on his values – seemingly out of place in a corporate setting –which were highly spiritual. And nothing symbolized that spirituality more than his concept of the “mission of enterprise.”

His mission of business philosophy was developed when he visited a religious sect’s head temple early in his career.

Matsushita witnessed a work ethic he never encountered before, which described as “the power drawn forth by religion at work among men.” Everything worked with such clockwork smoothness that he called it “the epitome of skillful management.”

Matsushita, who would later on become one of the world’s leading industrialists, realized that business could be a sacred pursuit, and he began to emulate the spiritual fervor he had witnessed in running his company.

The starting point was defining his company’s mission. Matsushita wrote:

“The mission of a manufacturer is to overcome poverty . . . Our primary concern is to eliminate poverty and increase wealth. How? By producing goods in abundant supply. . . The true mission of Matsushita Electric is to produce an inexhaustible supply of goods, thus creating peace and prosperity throughout the land.”

Matsushita gave his company two-and-a-half centuries (250 years) to fulfill this mission. But instead of sounding like a far-off dream, that 250 year mission was divided into ten 25-year phases, with different objectives and activities for each phase.

Matsushita Electric has taken – and if it remains true to its mission – will continue to take one step at a time, never skipping a stage.

In Konosuke Matsushita’s own words: “This is as it should be in any effort, all manner of striving pursued as they steadily and ceaselessly as an ever-flowing river.”