Konosuke Matsushita
Japan's post-Meiji industrial expansion created conditions in which individual entrepreneurs could build enterprises from modest beginnings into operations of considerable scale. Kōnosuke Matsushita, born on November 27, 1894, in Wakayama, was a citizen of both the Empire of Japan and later Japan itself, and he came to be one of the country's most prominent industrialists.
Working as a businessperson, entrepreneur, inventor, and politician, Matsushita founded Panasonic, a company whose origins are inseparable from his own career as an industrialist. He also founded the Matsushita Institute of Government and Management, extending his activities into an institutional form beyond his core commercial work. He was additionally associated with the PHP Research Institute, Inc. In Japan, he came to be referred to as the "God of Management," a title reflecting the particular regard in which his business career was held domestically.
Matsushita died on April 27, 1989, in Moriguchi, having lived to the age of 94. During his lifetime he received several formal honors from the Japanese state: the Medal with Blue Ribbon, the Order of the Sacred Treasure (1st Class), and the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers (1st Class). That last decoration, among the most distinguished awards the Japanese government confers, stands as a concrete marker of the official recognition his career earned before his death.
Quotes by Konosuke Matsushita
We are apt to think that our ideas are the creation of our own wisdom but the truth is that they are the result of the experience through outside contact.
We are going to win and the industrial West is going to lose out; there’s not much you can do about it because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves.
It is a kind of law of nature. The goal one aims for can rarely be reached by a direct road.
The main purpose of production is to manufacture items of good quality for daily use in abundant supply, thereby enhancing and improving the life for everyone and it is this goal that I am dedicated.
You may be a well-educated, clever and virtuous person, but those qualities will not necessarily make you a successful businessman. You must give your best to each and every task you take on, and reflect on your performance with an honest and unprejudiced eye.
If we cannot make a profit, that means we are committing a sort of crime against society. We take society’s capital, we take their people, we take their materials, yet without a good profit, we are using precious resources that could be better used elsewhere.
Possessing material comforts in no way guarantees happiness. Only spiritual wealth can bring true true happiness.
A natural response to a natural phenomenon -that is the secret of success in business and management. You will always win if you rely on common sense.
