Driving Honda: Inside the World's Most Innovative Car Company by Jeffrey Rothfeder

Author:Jeffrey Rothfeder
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

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Honda’s Innovation Machine

Soichiro Honda and Charles Handy did not know each other but their minds had clearly met. Just as Honda was among the most eccentric and creative engineers in automotive history, Handy stands out as a wholly original thinker in the area of organizational behavior and management, fields that suffer from a shortage of nonconformist ideas.

And although they came from very different upbringings, the pair viewed many aspects of life through the same lens. You can hear Soichiro’s disdain for formal education—how little it teaches about common sense and the ways it stifles do-it-yourself ingenuity—in Handy’s words: “Instead of a national curriculum for education, what is really needed is an individual curriculum for every child.”

Or you can see the contours of Honda’s global localization strategy in Handy’s support for the decentralized organization—or as he calls it, the Federalist model: “With people scattered around the world, you really have to let them be on their own. . . . That means you have to run the organization on the basis of professionalism and trust—subsidiarity. If you run an organization like that, you really have to base it around relatively small, long-term, continuing units where each member has a high level of commitment.”

Given the intellectual kinship between the two men, it is not surprising that one of Handy’s most valuable and practical concepts for continuous innovation in a company has had perhaps its most skillful application at Honda Motor. It involves paradox and thinking one or more steps ahead of everyone else, two ideas that are closely linked to Honda’s success.

Handy, who was born in 1932 in an Anglican parsonage in Ireland’s rural County Kildare, lived a fairly conventional first half or so of his life—a degree from the royal Oriel College Oxford and soon after, in 1956, a marketing executive job at Royal Dutch Shell. But Handy left Shell in the mid-1960s after being threatened with a posting to Liberia. He pursued a career in academia, including a stint as a professor at the London Business School. And by the early 1980s, Handy was on his own, leaving the “shelter of organizations . . . (to) fend for myself,” as he wrote in his totally enjoyable autobiographical tome, The Elephant and the Flea.

In that book and in many lectures, Handy describes a world made up of, among other things, elephants, which are the large corporations and multinational conglomerates, and the fleas—individuals who either on their own or through downsizing have found themselves feeding off a number of elephants as independent contractors with a portfolio of jobs.

Handy loves being a flea; it was the path he chose. But he believes that proper education utterly fails to prepare people for the less structured and more autonomous work that occurs outside an organization’s walls. Schools offer neither the emotional nor the intellectual tools to handle that type of life, Handy contends. And yet, he posits, an increasing number of people now either are compelled to face a career as a flea or would prefer it to working in an identity-less corporation.

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