Panasonic’s CEO Urges Managers to Embrace a ‘Sense of Crisis’

Panasonic Holdings Corp.’s managers need to feel more of a “sense of crisis” given the company’s low profitability and will be judged accordingly, Chief Executive Officer Yuki Kusumi said.

“If they don’t produce results, they will have to be replaced,” Kusumi said in a recent interview. “The reason for not producing results is the lack of a sense of crisis.”

Those are unusually harsh words in Japan, and especially at Panasonic, where the notion of lifetime employment was embraced for years. Two months ago, Kusumi warned in a strategy briefing that the Osaka-based Japanese electronics ...