Konosuke Matsushita 松下幸之助

ㄧ直沒空看電視來比較日本經營之神松下幸之助（1905-89）之喪及其他層面……【紐約時報引AP之文半頁WEB PAGE；Konosuke Matsushita, Industrialist, Is Dead at 94 則有數倍之篇幅專文….】

Konosuke Matsushita, Industrialist, Is Dead at 94

By STEVE LOHR

Published: April 27, 1989

LEAD: Konosuke Matsushita, who rose from poverty to found the world's largest producer of home electric appliances and to become Japan's leading postwar industrialist, died this morning in Osaka, Japan. He was 94 years old.

Konosuke Matsushita, who rose from poverty to found the world's largest producer of home electric appliances and to become Japan's leading postwar industrialist, died this morning in Osaka, Japan. He was 94 years old.

Mr. Matsushita died in a hospital he founded. The cause of death was pneumonia, but he had been ailing for some time.

An orphan who became one of Japan's wealthiest men, Mr. Matsushita (pronounced mat-SOOSH-ta) started his business career as an entrepreneurial maverick not connected with the giant financial and industrial groups, known as zaibatsu, that dominated the Japanese economy in the prewar years. Model Emulated in West

Yet after the war, the former outsider came to symbolize the emergence of Japan as a more egalitarian, consumer-oriented society. His approach to business and managing people became a model emulated in Japan and widely studied in the West.

The Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, which Mr. Matsushita established in 1918, is often described as the prototype of clan-like corporations that have been the engines of Japan's postwar ''economic miracle.'' In tens of thousands of stores around the world, its products are sold under the brand names of Panasonic and National.

Mr. Matsushita started his company with one product - an electric light socket of his own design - three employees and capital of about $50.

Today, Matsushita Electric Industrial makes more than 14,000 products, ranging from electric batteries and rice cookers to video cassette recorders and computer chips. The company employs 120,000 people worldwide and had estimated sales last year of $42 billion. The Company as Family

Mr. Matsushita had a traditional businessman's belief in profit making. Yet one of his motivational insights -especially timely given Japan's economic straits and cultural turmoil after the war - was to inspire the total commitment by his workers to the company's goals by offering them not just material well-being, but also social meaning. ''People need a way of linking their productive lives to society,'' Mr. Matsushita once said. In his view, private companies, properly directed and run, could provide such a link. ''Profits should not be a reflection of corporate greed,'' he explained, ''but a vote of confidence from society that what is offered by the firm is valued.''

At Matsushita Electric, the devotion of the workers to the company is evidenced by the daily singing of the company song, the recitation of the company's seven ''spirutual'' values and, typically, taking less than half of one's allotted vacation days each year.

For its part in the reciprocal bond, the company not only guarantees lifetime employment, but also provides the workers with houses, gymnasiums, hospitals, schools and wedding halls. In fact, those who marry another Matsushita employee receive a cash bonus. Concept of Total Embrace

Matsushita personifies the Japanese employment system called ''marugakae,'' or total embrace. Recent social changes in Japan seem to have had little effect as yet on Masushita's close-knit corporate culture. However, there are signs that the younger generation of Japanese, who tend to be more individualistic in outlook than their parents, are generally less eager to link their values so closely with those of their employer. Similarly, many younger Japanese prefer higher wages to the package of benefits paternally provided by a company.

Indeed, during an interview at the company's Osaka headquarters in 1982, when Mr. Matsushita was 87 years old, he observed that even in Japan, communal interests seemed to be giving way to individual desires. ''People's actions are now too much arranged by self-interest,'' he said. ''This is the beginning of evil.''

The aged executive was small to the point of frailty; he was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 125 pounds. Throughout his life, Mr. Matsushita's daily regimen was abstemious. Forceful in Business

Though diminutive in stature, self-effacing in manner and soft-spoken, Mr. Matsushita was a forceful and articulate advocate of his views on a wide range of contemporary issues. During the 1982 interview, he dwelt on the problem of Japan's increasing trade frictions with the West because of its flood of exports, many of them the very products that Matsushita makes.

''After the war, we had nothing so we had to export to rehabilitate,'' he recalled. ''But Japanese industry cannot depend so much on exports in the future. In particular, we should not have so many 'hungry exports,' ones that hurt the workers of foreign countries. And we should collaborate more with other countries by building factories and creating jobs abroad.''

Mr. Matsushita practiced that philosophy. At the start of the 1980's, Matsushita began to build more plants in foreign nations to insure that an increasing share of its products sold abroad are also produced overseas. Japanese Horatio Alger Story

Born on Nov. 27, 1894, Mr. Matsushita's life and business career have the elements of a Japanese Horatio Alger story. His parents and five of seven siblings died when he was a child, leaving him to fend for himself. To survive, he got a job at 9 as an errand boy.

Even at an early age, Mr. Matsushita displayed an independent-mindedness that tends to be rare in Japan. At the age of 16, he left his job as an apprentice bicycle repairman to work for the Osaka Electric Light Company.

Eight years later, he deserted a steady job as a wiring inspector to start his own business. His first try with a light socket he designed was a failure. To make ends meet, he had to pawn his wife's kimono. Attachment Plug a Success

But he had more success with his next effort, an electric attachment plug that sold for 30 percent less than the competitors' products. With that, the fledgling entrepreneur was on his way.

Yet Mr. Matsushita was known more for being an imaginative merchandiser than an inventor. For example, when shopkeepers refused to believe that his battery-powered bicycle lamp could shine continuously for 30 hours, he placed one in each one of the skeptic's stores and turned it on. Soon, the bicycle lamp was a big seller.

Mr. Matsushita once explained that his business hero was Henry Ford, who brought the automobile to millions of ordinary citizens.

During World War II, Mr. Matsushita's plants were drafted into the war effort. Near the end of the war, the military came to him and told him to make wooden training planes. ''When they came to me to manufacture airplanes,'' he said, ''I knew things were hopeless.''

After the war, the United States occupation at first grouped Matsushita with the zaibatsu, industrial combines with links to the military, and marked the company for dissolution as part of the democratization. Workers Helped Save Company

To stop the breakup of their company, delegations of Matsushita workers traveled to Tokyo to plead with the occupation authorities that their boss was not one of the industrialists imbued with militarism who pushed Japan into war. After three years of entreaties, Matsushita was taken off the purge list.

By the late 1950's, with Japan's recovery well under way, Matsushita was the main supplier of the ''three treasures'' that every Japanese household desired and increasingly could afford: a washing machine, refrigerator and black-and-white television. 'Fill the World With Products'

A man given to philosophical pronouncements, Mr. Matsushita once explained his life's mission: ''I watched a vagrant drinking tap water outside somebody's house and noticed that no one complained about it,'' he said. ''Even though the water was processed and distributed, it was so cheap that it didn't matter. I began to think about abundance, and I decided that the mission of the industrialist is to fill the world with products and eliminate wants.''

Mr. Matsushita was far more than a charismatic leader and an aggressive merchandiser. His flexibility was his particular genius, enabling his company to make the transitions necessary to become a major industrial enterprises.

Though he had little formal education, Mr. Matsushita studied broadly, particularly foreign business practices. Sometimes borrowing and at other times using home-grown tactics, he installed at Matsushita elements of the modern corporation.

Explaining the changes in his own approach, Mr. Matsushita said, ''When you have 100 employees, you are on the front line and even if you yell and hit them, they follow, but if the group grows to 1,000, you must not be on the front line but stay in the middle. When the organization grows to 10,000, you stand behind in awe and give thanks.''