I think an interesting point is that, for example in US corporate culture, it would be unacceptable to have a non-facetious theme of empathy running throughout such a strategic document. Whereas, it seems to me that the Japanese management culture truly allows for this sort of thing, compared to US board rooms. The world needs more of this, so well done Japan!
The money slide for me was the top companies by market capitalization over time, where you see railroads (old transport and information infrastructure) ousted by fuel and steel (car infrastructure), ousted by infotech infrastructure.
I don't buy that. It may not be as facetious as in the US, but it's still facetious. Most manufacturing companies, and all the large ones, have replaced a large fraction of their fulltime blue collar workforce with temp workers whose contracts last for 2-3 years. The mothership will _subcontract_ out work to subsidiary companies (for example, software development work) so that they can maintain their lockstep pay/promotion schedules in the mothership, but pay the subsidiary employees less [1]. Companies in Japan are just as profit motivated as their US peers. True corporate empathy ended a very very long time ago, if it ever existed (probably existed a few hundred years ago)
It's just a matter of what kind of marketing is acceptable and believable to the general public.
Also keep in mind that Son Masayoshi is a master PR user. Nowhere else have I seen someone use PR towards the general public to lobby for things like wireless spectrum auctions and solar energy government subsidies.
[1] most of the time, unless it's a special case company full of researcher types.
The money slide for me was the top companies by market capitalization over time, where you see railroads (old transport and information infrastructure) ousted by fuel and steel (car infrastructure), ousted by infotech infrastructure.