I just finished reading this one and I highly recommend it!
At first I must admit I was not really into studying up on Matsushita (Panasonic, Sanyo, National brands) as it was such a massive company (it dwarfed Sony) that I had it in my head it was started by some sort of venture capital, or family money, or a large group of industrialists in post war Japan. All wrong! There are may lessons for entrepreneurs in this story.
Konosuke Mastushita was the founder of Mastushita Electric Industries when he was quite young and by his 30s, he was running a fast growing empire. But his beginnings were the most interesting- how hardship shaped his success.
He initially came from a wealthy family, but his father lost the family fortune trading rice futures. They had to move into a small tenement house outside of Osaka. He had 10 siblings in total. Eventually, they sent him away at age 9 to work as an apprentice in Osaka. This is a difficult event for any child, but over time it got worse. His father died, mother, siblings one by one, and eventually by the time Matsushita was 27 years old, his entire family was dead. He was the sole survivor.
He learned a lot about business at the bicycle shop he was apprenticing at, and eventually took a job with Osaka Light, an early electric company. There he learned how to lead people and about electrical devices. But eventually, that persistent entrepreneurial bug kept biting and he wanted to start his own thing.
When Nippon Chisso Hiryo started his first company in 1906 he had a college degree and a ¥100,000 advance (a lot of money at the time) from a banker friend.
When Kiichiro Toyoda launched his car company, "Toyota" he had ¥1,000,000 in capital from his family business to get going. The founders of Sony and Honda also had similar assistance.
When Matsushita founded MEI in 1917, he had ¥100 and four assistants, one was his wife, and two of the others eventually quit when the going got tough. None of them had even a high school education. None had experience with a startup company. None were wealthy or had wealthy connections to finance and none of them even knew how to manufacture an electrical socket. Their "factory" was 130sqft in a two room tenement house, in which they also lived and slept. They initially failed at everything. Their initial products were not good enough to sell/nobody wanted to buy them, and they went for months without pay (which lead to the 2 assistants quitting) and had their backs against the wall for much of the startup phase.
This is how Panasonic (a company that in 1994 had revenues of 49.5 Billion dollars) was started.
Its titled Matsushita Leadership, and there are a lot of leadership gems in there, but to my pleasant surprise, its really a startup story and a great, inspirational read!
At first I must admit I was not really into studying up on Matsushita (Panasonic, Sanyo, National brands) as it was such a massive company (it dwarfed Sony) that I had it in my head it was started by some sort of venture capital, or family money, or a large group of industrialists in post war Japan. All wrong! There are may lessons for entrepreneurs in this story.
Konosuke Mastushita was the founder of Mastushita Electric Industries when he was quite young and by his 30s, he was running a fast growing empire. But his beginnings were the most interesting- how hardship shaped his success.
He initially came from a wealthy family, but his father lost the family fortune trading rice futures. They had to move into a small tenement house outside of Osaka. He had 10 siblings in total. Eventually, they sent him away at age 9 to work as an apprentice in Osaka. This is a difficult event for any child, but over time it got worse. His father died, mother, siblings one by one, and eventually by the time Matsushita was 27 years old, his entire family was dead. He was the sole survivor.
He learned a lot about business at the bicycle shop he was apprenticing at, and eventually took a job with Osaka Light, an early electric company. There he learned how to lead people and about electrical devices. But eventually, that persistent entrepreneurial bug kept biting and he wanted to start his own thing.
When Nippon Chisso Hiryo started his first company in 1906 he had a college degree and a ¥100,000 advance (a lot of money at the time) from a banker friend.
When Kiichiro Toyoda launched his car company, "Toyota" he had ¥1,000,000 in capital from his family business to get going. The founders of Sony and Honda also had similar assistance.
When Matsushita founded MEI in 1917, he had ¥100 and four assistants, one was his wife, and two of the others eventually quit when the going got tough. None of them had even a high school education. None had experience with a startup company. None were wealthy or had wealthy connections to finance and none of them even knew how to manufacture an electrical socket. Their "factory" was 130sqft in a two room tenement house, in which they also lived and slept. They initially failed at everything. Their initial products were not good enough to sell/nobody wanted to buy them, and they went for months without pay (which lead to the 2 assistants quitting) and had their backs against the wall for much of the startup phase.
This is how Panasonic (a company that in 1994 had revenues of 49.5 Billion dollars) was started.
Its titled Matsushita Leadership, and there are a lot of leadership gems in there, but to my pleasant surprise, its really a startup story and a great, inspirational read!
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