Panasonic Well

Strategic foundation work that turned out to be Panasonic’s own.

In 2022, I joined an incubator inside Panasonic to scale a consumer concierge service. Two years later, the strategic foundation the work produced — without any reference to the company’s founding philosophy — turned out to be a rearticulation of Kōnosuke Matsushita’s original premise for the company, written generations earlier. That recognition made the work absorbable by Panasonic in a way that’s almost unprecedented for a Japanese company accepting outside strategic influence.

In April 2022, I joined Yoky Matsuoka — formerly the CTO at Nest, a co-founder at Google X, and one of the originators of Apple Health — to help scale a new product she’d launched called Yohana, a concierge service that helped families offload day-to-day tasks. Yohana was operating in a test market in Seattle, but the interesting aspect wasn’t just the startup; it’s that this was an incubator inside of Panasonic. The single product was just the starting point. Expand the test market, roll out nationally, and then get launched in Tokyo.

That brief held for three months.

We realized that the single product that had been created just wasn’t enough. The business couldn’t scale to the level it needed to, and we needed to pivot the nature of the business to chase after the changes in the industry. In July 2022, we looked at the changing nature of the industry, of the audience, and of the technologies we’d employ. We landed on a two-axis framework — Mediated-to-Unmediated and Generic-to-Tailored — that plotted the consumer technology landscape. The crowded middle held the assistants, the health trackers, the smart-home platforms — Google Home, Apple Home, Fitbit, Siri, Alexa. Yohana plotted in the upper-right corner alongside Uber and Quoori: mediated and tailored. But the corner was crowded too, and competing in it on those axes would mean fighting for incremental advantage against a long list of well-capitalized competitors.

The real strategic move was a third axis the existing framework didn’t show. Every consumer technology product, regardless of where it sat on the Mediated/Tailored grid, was being built for the individual user. Families needed to be seen as a whole, together. Apple Home optimized for the individual’s preferences. Fitbit measured the individual’s health. Siri responded to the individual’s voice. The entire category had organized itself around personalization for one. The whitespace was Collective — building for the family as a unit rather than for the individuals inside it.

That reframe became the strategic foundation. Yohana wasn’t a concierge service competing with Uber and Quoori on mediation. Yohana was the first consumer technology product organized around Collective Well-Being — the recognition that families don’t experience well-being individually, that the well-being of any one family member is structurally entangled with the well-being of the others, and that consumer technology had failed to build for that fact. The shared belief that anchored the work was Collective Well-Being. The purpose was to constantly create possibilities for modern families to thrive. The customer experience was framed by what families actually wanted from the product: Get Stuff Done, Time Back, More Space, Less Stress. The interface between the product and the family was the operationalization of Collective Well-Being itself.

That strategic foundation was articulated in July 2022, three months into the engagement, by a team working in Seattle and Palo Alto with no reference to Kōnosuke Matsushita’s original writings about what Panasonic was for.

In September 2022, the team traveled to Tokyo for the Yohana launch in Japan. Five days in Osaka and Tokyo. The trip included a visit to the Panasonic Museum.

That’s where the connection became visible.

Matsushita founded Panasonic in 1918. The philosophical foundation he articulated for the company was that business existed to contribute to the well-being of society — not the well-being of any individual customer, but the collective well-being of the communities the company served. He wrote a 250-year plan for the company, dividing the future into ten 25-year epochs, each of which would enable the business to reimagine itself based on the technology available at the time. Throughout, the organizing principle held: business in service of collective flourishing. Standing in the museum, reading the founder’s original writings translated into English, I recognized that the strategic foundation we had articulated in July — Collective Well-Being as the central premise of the work — was a rearticulation of what Matsushita had written about Panasonic generations before.

We hadn’t been told about Matsushita’s philosophy when we did the strategic work. We had arrived at it independently, working from consumer insight and category analysis. The fact that it matched wasn’t a coincidence anyone manufactured. It was a recognition that the deepest version of consumer well-being and the deepest version of Panasonic’s founding philosophy were the same idea, articulated 104 years apart in different languages, by different people, in different cultural registers.

Later, in our Palo Alto offices, I had separate meetings with the CEO, Kusumi-san, and the Chairman, Tsuga-san. When I explained the connection to Tsuga-san — that the strategic foundation we had produced had turned out to be a rearticulation of Matsushita’s founding premise — he responded with a line that, in paraphrase, was: I know. That’s why I like you all so much. You understand.

That exchange is the credential. For a 100-year-old Japanese company to accept outside strategic influence at this depth is genuinely uncommon. The reason Panasonic could absorb the work into its institutional DNA, in a way that would have been impossible for almost any other Western strategic engagement, was that the work was already, structurally, Panasonic. It didn’t have to be translated into something the company could accept. It had been Panasonic from the beginning — we just hadn’t known it yet when we wrote it.

The operational work that followed unfolded from that foundation.

By October 2022, the team was setting the stage for an agentic platform — not a concierge service augmented by software, but a fundamentally different architecture in which AI agents acting on behalf of families could navigate the diversity of needs inside a household across health, time, education, and decision-making. ChatGPT launched publicly on November 30, 2022; by the time the consumer AI conversation broke open, the strategic foundation was already four months old and the agentic architecture was six weeks into being built. The work wasn’t a response to the AI moment. The work was already inside it.

In March 2023, I hired our first Global Head of Insights from Google’s Bard team to bring agentic-to-human behavioral research directly into the work. By that point I was running Brand, Marketing, Design, and Strategy across the business, and we had just coined the new brand name: Panasonic Well.

The summer of 2023 was spent operationalizing Collective Well-Being into a framework the product team could actually build against. The strategic foundation was a philosophical claim; the human truth underneath it was what would make the claim livable. The global consumer insight program produced the bridge: families want to reach Harmony — a state where personal and shared well-being are both prioritized, where each family member can bring their best, most present self to the others, especially when spending quality time together. To get there, every solution in the family’s ecosystem has to do two things at once: Build Trust and Support Us. Build Trust by reassuring, enabling control, inspiring confidence, and ensuring value. Support Us in ways that make the family feel understood, resilient, empowered, and accomplished.

That human truth — Create Harmony as the lived experience of Collective Well-Being — was what made the agentic architecture buildable. Every feature, every interaction, every decision the agents made on behalf of the family had to meet both the trust and the support tests. The framework gave the team a way to evaluate whether what they were building was actually the right thing.

By October 2023 the strategy was operational across the business. By March 21, 2024, the team had delivered a full prototype of how the agentic family platform would work. The patents the work produced — covering the processes of bringing AI to consumer families in early-stage validation environments — are the artifacts of having operated at the leading edge of the category as it formed.

Umi was the first product. The first agentic AI platform for families, unveiled on stage at CES 2025 as the proof point behind everything Panasonic Well had been building. The CES launch included the announcement of the Panasonic-Anthropic alliance — one of the major partnerships that brought a leading AI lab into direct collaboration with Panasonic on the agentic platform. The alliance was one credential among several. The headline was Umi itself, and the strategic argument Umi embodied: Collective Well-Being, operationalized in software, for the family as a unit.

Umi launched into the strategic context of Panasonic Go.

Panasonic Go is the company’s strategic reset — the articulation of what the next 25 years of Panasonic should be. The name carries the inheritance. Go is the phonetic representation of the number five in Japanese. The fifth epoch. The work draws directly on Matsushita’s 250-year plan: the recognition that the longest-running businesses are the ones that build into themselves the discipline of periodic reinvention. Panasonic Go is the strategic articulation of the fifth 25-year period. Umi was its consumer-facing proof point. Collective Well-Being was the philosophical foundation that connected the fifth epoch to the first.

The Panasonic Well business does not operate today. The structural challenges Panasonic faces globally — the same challenges that made the strategic reset necessary in the first place — meant that the consumer-facing operating entity wound down. But the strategic intent the work produced is being carried forward by the office of the Chief Strategy Officer. The argument, the architecture, the prototype, and the patents are continuing to shape Panasonic’s articulation of what the fifth epoch should be.

That distinction matters. The case study isn’t about a product that shipped and then didn’t. It’s about strategic foundation work that produced an argument durable enough to outlast the operating entity that delivered it — and durable enough, more importantly, to be recognizable to the company as its own founding philosophy.

What this work proved, more than anything specific to Panasonic, is that the most consequential strategic work doesn’t introduce a new argument to an institution. It produces an argument the institution recognizes as its own. The framework that anchors brand work at the altitude of a 100-year-old company can’t be imported from the outside; it has to be articulated in a way that makes the institution feel found rather than changed. The work at Panasonic Well wasn’t a strategic intervention. It was the recognition, produced from outside, that Panasonic had been right about what it was for from the beginning — and the operational architecture for bringing that recognition into the next 25 years.

Collective Well-Being was the strategic foundation. Create Harmony was the human truth. Umi was the proof point. Panasonic Go was the institutional expression. Matsushita’s 250-year plan was the inheritance. The work was the discipline of articulating all five as a single coherent argument the company could absorb as its own.

The Chairman’s line was the reception. The argument was the work.