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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

Panasonic suffered so much by its committee based product decisions that it had to leave the consumer space as its core business. The decision to let high-risk Tesla lead a Japanese electronic giants manufacturing power as visionaire is currently the most exciting cultural decision by an Asian corporation. Cultural because by doing so Tsuga-san (Panasonic's CEO and my former boss when he was in charge of DVD and Blu-Ray) left the corporation's 1000 year paternalistic consumer product plan (no joke) of the founder far behind.

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Serious question: I've heard about these very, very, long term business plans made by Japanese companies before but I've no idea what they look like or why they make them. Do they seriously believe that any part of the plan further away than a few decades will have any resemblance to reality? Are founders and CEOs thought to be oracles of some kind?

"2245: Our company will be first to market with a practical application of the latest breakthrough in particle physics, growing to become a leading provider of teleportation services for logistics and business travel"

What's remarkable is how little there is on the web, and how empty most of those are. I caught a programme that discussed these briefly a few months back, then followed with some googling. I found out almost nothing except Japan has a lot of old companies.

As for the plans? That they're to balance short termism and identify long term trends to keep the company in existance. Could have got that much from guesswork. If I want to know more I think I'd have to learn Japanese.

Presumably leads to things like Toyota's fuel cell ambitions, and zero carbon factories in 50 years.

I think you are referring to the 250 year plan? Could you elaborate on how that looked in practice? I see a few PR pieces on the web but they don't go into any detail.

Either it's "the most exciting cultural decision by an Asian corporation" or it's two companies grasping at straws on their way to the bottom. (I'm bearish on both. Does it show?)

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