Did you know: Konosuke Matsushita founded Panasonic?

Source: Economist.com

In the West, Matsushita was little more than a well-known Japanese conglomerate until John Kotter, a management academic and recognised authority on leadership, wrote a book called “Matsushita Leadership” (Simon & Schuster, 1997), which won the Financial Times global business book of the year award and handed the little-known (and by then dead) founder of the eponymous company, Konosuke Matsushita (1894-1989), the mantle of global leadership greatness.

Unlike his rival Akio Morita at Sony, he was neither charismatically handsome nor internationally recognised. Unlike most well-known western politicians, he didn’t excel at public speaking, and in later years his voice grew increasingly frail. He rarely displayed speed-of-light intellectual skills or warmed an audience with hilarious anecdotes. Nevertheless, he did what all great leaders do—motivate large groups of individuals to improve the human condition.

He had none of the attributes of contemporaneous leaders in the West—of macho chauvinists like Jack Welch at General Electric, or of colourful characters like Sir John Harvey-Jones of Britain’s ICI. But still he could inspire large groups of individuals and he was known in Japan as the “god of management”. Kotter’s book set out to explore how he did it, through early hardship and a never-ending thirst for learning.

Matsushita was the son of a landowner who lost all his money, forcing Konosuke to go out to work in Osaka well before he was 16. He started as an electrician at Osaka Electrical Light Company, but then he invented a new sort of light socket and, at the age of 23, set up a company with his brother-in-law, Toshio Iue, to manufacture it. At first he produced his electrical goods under the brand name National, but later he introduced the name Panasonic, for which the company is best-known today. He ruled his companies with a considerable degree of paternalism and offered his workers employment for life.

In his later years he took to explaining his social philosophy and wrote a number of books. One of them, “Developing a Road to Peace and Happiness through Prosperity”, sold several million copies. Matsushita died at the age of 94, recognised before his death as one of the richest men in the world.


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