But while such changes may be easy to articulate, they are hard to implement. For all of its talk , Matsushita was slow to dismantle its lifetime employment commitment to those hired under the traditional system. This was underlined early in Nakamura’s tenure when in response to continued poor performance , Matsushita announced it would close 30 factoires in Japan ,cut 13,000 jobs including 1,000 management jobs, and sell a “huge amount of assets “ over the next three years . While this seemed to indicate a final break with the lifetime employment system – it represented the first layoffs in the company’s history – the company also said unneeded management staff would not be fired but instead transferred to higher growth areas such as health care .