Metadata
- Authors: Jeffrey Rothfeder
- Full Title:: Driving Honda: Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company
- Category:: đź“šBooks
- Finished date:: 2023-05-19
Highlights
Honda was represented by its leading global executive, CEO Hiroyuki Yoshino, and lesser officials from Honda of America and the Lincoln plant brain trust. Like every CEO in Honda’s history, Yoshino rose through the ranks of engineering and research and development—an unspoken but unchallenged prerequisite for those following in the footsteps of Soichiro Honda, who was among Japan’s most creative engineers when he founded the company. Other automakers, like other outfits in any industry, tend to fill top jobs with MBAs whose expertise lies in marketing, sales, or finance. (View Highlight)
Instead, Honda seeks workers who have charted an irregular course, whose path in life has been a bit odd and unconventional. And the farther they’ve stayed from the auto industry—and are free of the preexisting biases about how automobile manufacturing should be done—the better. “We want independent people, who can see auto manufacturing with fresh eyes, not blind followers,” said Honda CEO Takanobu Ito on many occasions. (View Highlight)
Such untempered innovation in ideas and practice can only be achieved with employees who, in fact, wouldn’t flourish—who would, in Soichiro’s words, be in trouble—in organizational models constructed primarily around rules and structured systems, no matter how progressively or intelligently plotted, Honda believes. Or put positively, an individual who can thrive in paradox and contradiction, who would instinctively explore the way things are traditionally done expressly to contradict them—who, in fact, sees a glass not as half full or half empty, but as twice the size that it needs to be and considers designing a vessel with different dimensions—would be a suitable Honda candidate (View Highlight)
Honda views itself as the mirror image of Toyota, its oldest rival. (View Highlight)
Honda man, guerrilla fighter. Honda man loves chaos. Toyota man hates, hates chaos.’” (View Highlight)
Honda’s off-kilter approach to hiring—its belief that each individual must actively redefine the contours of his or her job rather than the other way around— (View Highlight)
The person who knows nothing about the job is perhaps the person that should be doing the job,” said Akio Hamada, a Honda senior managing director. “They’re going to be able to view the job without preconceived ideas. In turn, they will do the job better (View Highlight)