direction was structured as a five-year planning cycle that "focuses on company-wide new technologies and new environmental expectations, and integrated month-by-month forecasts of production, inventory, and distribution. Finally, at the level of adapting mechanisms, the company a created three customer-oriented sales groups charged with the task of consolidating its marketing competencies, infrastructures, and customer relationships to ensure that these are shared and exploited across the seven sectors" (Ghoshal & Mintzberg, 1994, p. 15). Corporate level coordination over technologies that "cut across sectors·have also been strengthened, and the company has established a number of cross-functional and cross-sector groups to promote cooperative teamworking in areas such as development of new multimedia products and reduction of time-to-market" (Ghoshal & Mintzberg, 1994, p. 15).
Matsushita is structured as a keiretsu (Shimotani, 1995, p. 55). The Japanese keiretsu is characterized by a grouping of vertically linked firms (Shimotani, 1995, p. 54). These links act as close, long-term business relationships between large corporations and a number of selected smaller firms. The links have been characterized as "rational effective systems, especially suited to the circumstances of Japan's industrialisation, and as a factor in its economic success. On the other hand, they have been criticised as closed systems that exclude potential competitors" (Shimotani, 1995, p. 54). Keiretsu are generally divided into production keiretsu, financial keiretsu, and distribution keiretsu. "As a pioneer of distribution keiretsu, Matsushita a grew in Japan by securing the outlet of its products at 'appropriate' prices, and is now its nation's largest electronics manufacturer. Its distribution structure was founded in the 1930s, but the changes introduced in the 1950s finally brought it substantial commercial advantages, and encouraged rivals to f...