For decades there have been two iconic Japanese auto companies One has been endlessly studied and written about The other has been generally underappreciated and misunderstood Until nowSince its birth as a motorcycle company in Honda has steadily grown into the worlds fifth largest automaker and top engine manufacturer as well as one of the most beloved most profitable and most consistently innovative multinational corporations What drives the company that keeps creating and improving award-winning and bestselling models like the Civic Accord Odyssey CR-V and PilotAccording to Jeffrey Rothfeder what truly distinguishes Honda from its competitors especially archrival Toyota is a deep commitment to a set of unorthodox management tenets The Honda Way as insiders call it is notable for decentralization over corporate control simplicity over complexity experimentation over Six Sigmadriven efficiency and unyielding cynicism toward the status quo and whatever is assumed to be the truth Honda believes in freely borrowing from the past as a bridge to innovative discontinuity in the present And those are just a few of the ideas that the companys colorful founder Soichiro Honda embedded in the DNA of his start-up sixty-five years agoAs the first journalist allowed behind Hondas infamously private doors Rothfeder interviewed dozens of executives engineers and frontline employees about its management practices and global strategy He shows how the company has developed and maintained its unmatched culture of innovation resilience and flexibilityand how it exported that culture to other countries that are strikingly different from Japan establishing locally controlled operations in each region where it lays down rootsFor instance Rothfeder reports on life at a Honda factory in the tiny town of Lincoln Alabama and what happened when American workers were trained to follow the Honda Way as a self-sufficient outpost of the global company Could they master Hondas three core principlesEmbrace ParadoxHonda encourages respectful disagreement and debate between opposing viewpoints on matters large and small New ideas often emerge from conflictReal Place Real Part Real KnowledgeHonda teaches people to argue using facts not assumptions One must go to the factory floor the showroom the parking lot the drivers seat or the truck bedwhatever it takesto get the facts and make a decision that can be supported with dataRespect IndividualismHonda often hires people with unusual backgrounds and independent streaks It promotes those who question the status quo and who would probably struggle in organizations that focus on rigid rules and systemsRothfeder shows how the Alabama plant became a new model for manufacturing in America It can turn out several different types of cars on any given day and up to vehicles and engines a year Its flexible model enables unparalleled responsiveness to market changes and recovery from mistakesAs Soichiro Honda himself liked to say Success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection In fact success represents one percent of your work which results only from the ninety-nine percent that is called failure.
