4 ideas
In December 1929, as the Depression hit, Matsushita Electric's sales collapsed and its warehouses filled with unsold stock. Matsushita, ill in bed, rejected his managers' plan to cut half the workforce. Instead he halved production by moving factory workers to half-days at full wages and had every employee spend the freed time selling the inventory, which was cleared within about two months without a single dismissal.
In 1932 Matsushita declared a new 'founding year' and set the company's mission as ending poverty by making goods abundant. He divided the goal into ten 25-year periods, each worked through by one generation of employees and handed on to the next. The long horizon turns the business from a vehicle for one founder's profit into a relay with a shared purpose, and ties each worker's day-to-day job to a multigenerational goal.
Matsushita noticed that a passerby can drink from someone else's tap without being blamed, because water is so plentiful it is nearly free. He made this the manufacturer's goal: produce necessities in such volume and at such low cost that they become as cheap and available as tap water. On this view the elimination of poverty is an engineering and scale problem that industry can solve.
Matsushita argues that a company belongs to society even when private individuals own it, because it uses society's people, capital and resources. On this account profit is the payment society makes for useful contribution, so a business that fails to earn a profit is failing its social duty rather than only its shareholders. The same logic obliges it to protect its employees, who are part of the public trust it holds.