Driving Honda
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- Synopsis
- Since its birth as a motorcycle company in 1949, Honda has steadily grown into one of the world's largest automakers and engine manufacturers, 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 Pilot?According 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 Sigma-driven efficiency, and unyielding cynicism toward the status quo and whatever is assumed to be the truth. Those are just a few of the ideas that the company's colorful founder Soichiro Honda embedded in the DNA of his start-up sixty-five years ago.As the first journalist allowed behind Honda's infamously private doors, Rothfeder interviewed dozens of executives, engineers, and frontline employees about Honda's management practices and global strategy. He shows how the company developed and maintained its unmatched culture of innovation, resilience, and flexibility--and 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 roots.From the Trade Paperback edition.nciples:Embrace Paradox: Honda encourages respectful disagreement and debate between opposing viewpoints, on matters large and small. New ideas often emerge from conflict.Real Place, Real Part, Real Knowledge: Honda teaches people to argue using facts, not assumptions. One must go to the factory floor, the showroom, the parking lot, the driver's seat, or the truck bed--whatever it takes--to get the facts and make a decision that can be supported with data.Respect Individualism: Honda 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 systems.Rothfeder 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 300,000 vehicles and engines a year. Its flexible model enables unparalleled responsiveness to market changes and recovery from mistakes. As 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."
- Copyright:
- 2015
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9781101601419
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781591844730
- Publisher:
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Date of Addition:
- 09/22/15
- Copyrighted By:
- Jeffrey Rothfeder
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction, Business and Finance
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.