Matsushita, Konosuke (1894–1989)

Japanese entrepreneur and philanthropist. He founded his own business, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., in 1918, without capital or connections, and built it up into a global industrial enterprise as Matsushita Electric Industrial. Matsushita was a major contributor to Japan's economic boom after World War II, and a pioneer of new management practices. His vision was to create wealth not only for shareholders, but also for society as a whole. He retired as chair in 1973 to become a senior adviser.

The company was incorporated as Matsushita Electric Industrial in 1935, and diversified into television research and dry-cell batteries for radios and military products (which made a significant contribution to Japan's war effort). Expanding his sales horizons to Europe and North America, Matsushita signed a technical cooperation agreement with Philips in 1952, and opened an office in New York in 1953. Selling under the brand name Panasonic from 1959, the company shares were listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1971.

Matsushita was born in Wasa Village in Kaiso County. Both his parents died after the family's bankruptcy, and at the age of nine he began an apprenticeship at a bicycle shop in Osaka, during which he was said to have worked a 16-hour day. He started his career as an engineer for the Osaka Electric Light Company, where he designed a new electric light socket.

The Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. initially suffered from an inability to produce goods in bulk. Matsushita's breakthrough came in 1923, when he invented a battery-powered, bullet-shaped bicycle lamp. By pawning everything he possessed, he raised sufficient cash for the raw material to manufacture in quantity and sell large orders directly to retailers. From the lamp's commercial success, Matsushita built up a national network of salesmen; he was able to mass market his products by keeping his prices low and by advertising in newspapers, an unusual practice at that time. In 1929 Matsushita decentralized management, and adopted the objective ‘harmony between corporate profit and social justice’ and, in 1932, declared a mission statement for employees with an emphasis on customer satisfaction, high productivity, and teamwork. He set up a central research laboratory in Osaka in 1953, before establishing the Matsushita Research Institute Tokyo Inc. (MRIT) in Kawasaki in 1960 (as the first colour television was marketed). In 1961, the company's first overseas factory opened in Thailand. In 1977 he influenced an extraordinary decision (dubbed the ‘Yamashita leap’, after Japanese vaulting horse Olympic gold medallist Haruhiro Yamashita) to appoint as company president Japanese executive Toshihiko Yamashita, an obscure managing director, ranked 25th among the firm's top executives, and unrelated to the Matsushita family. This move jolted the company's seniority-based lifetime employment system.

He founded the PHP (Peace, Happiness, and Prosperity) Institute in 1946, created the Japan Prize in 1985, Japan's version of the Nobel Prize, and later wrote many books about his management philosophy.