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Konosuke Matsushita
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http://www.php.co.jp/japaninface/kmpage.html
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Leadership, General Management
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Born in a rural village in 1894, Konosuke Matsushita became one of the world's pre-eminent industrialists as well as a prominent thinker on social and philosophical questions.
Apprenticed at the age of nine, young Konosuke worked in a bicycle shop and then the Osaka Electric Light Company, where his wiring skills won him rapid promotion. His confidence in the virtues of a light socket he had designed led Matushita to found his own company in 1917, at the age of 22. Although the going was very tough at first, Matsushita Electric began to grow rapidly by the next year, with the employee rolls swelling to 20.
In 1923, Matsushita began offering his breatkthrough design of a bullet-shaped, battery-powered bicycle lamp directly to retailers. In a country where candle or petroleum bicycle lamps were then the rule, a lamp which burned for 30 to 40 hours was as unusual as a manufacturer who turned his sample on, left it running, and basically said, "If you're impressed, you know where to find me."
An Industrialist with a Vision
Matsushita Electric's lamp helped the company begin to build a national network of sales agents. In 1925, the company began to use the "National" trademark for its appliances as it began to reach out for the mass market by lowering prices to drive up sales volume, as Henry Ford had done. Advertising in newspapers, an unusual step for the time, begin in 1927. Two years later, the company adopted its basic management objectives and company creed, adopting the slogan "harmony between corporate profit and social justice." The basic management objectives today read as follows:
Recognizing our responsibilities as industrialists,
we will devote ourselves to the progress
and development of society
and the well-being of people through our business activities,
thereby enhancing the quality of life throughout the world.
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The rest of Konosuke Matsushita's career contained many notable highlights and examples of leadership under fire: his decision, during the 1930 economic crisis, not to fire factory employees but to send them out to sell the backlog of unsold inventory; the unusual move he adopted in 1931 of purchasing a vital and expensive patent and making it available free to all radio manufacturers, to stimulate growth; his declaration, in 1932, that entrepreneur and manufacturer alike should aim "to make all products as inexhaustible and as cheap as tap water"; his emphasis on cultivating"the spirit of the independent entrepreneur" in his employees, through such innovations as the company's division system; his founding of the PHP (Peace, Happiness, Prosperity) Institute in 1947; his 1952 tie-up with Holland's Philips; introduction of the five-day workweek in 1960; and countless other incidents. |
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