Driving Honda
Inside the World's Most Innovative Car Company
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
International Business Times editor in chief Rothfeder (McIlhenny's Gold) looks under the hood of Honda, a company with bragging rights including never having posted a loss, a stock price which has doubled since 2008, and factors of industrial performance that surpass the rest of the auto sector. Asserting that Honda is so successful because it "focuses on doing one thing well making engines that last a long time" and because it constantly "works to perfect this core skill," Rothfeder studies the company's history, culture, and principles. In lively fashion, he retraces the steps of visionary founder Soichiri Honda, who, in the wake of WWII, rose from a bike apprentice, to a piston company owner, to the founder of a small motorbike company that evolved into Honda. Rothfeder also paints intimate portraits of CFO Takeo Fujisawa, other top executives, and rank-and-file employees that humanize the narrative and illustrate how respect for individualism and innovation pervade the company's culture. Rothfeder's inside look at research and development and details about engines, motors, and assembly lines make this book an engineering or manufacturing fanatic's dream, but readers from all industries will enjoy this entertaining and informative work.
