Driving Honda
Subtitle: inside the world's most innovative car company
By: Jeffrey Rothfeder
Edition: Paperback edition.
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 314
ISBN-13: 9781591847977
Subjects: American Honda Motor Company; Automobile industry and trade; Management
Description: "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."--
Notes: Originally published in hardcover by Portfolio/Penguin in 2014.  With new afterword.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-303) and index.
Table of contents: title: Honda difference; title: Smell of oil; title: Principle #1 : embrace paradox; title: Principle #2 : real place, real part, real knowledge; title: Principle #3 : respect individualism; title: A uniquely Honda factory; title: Honda's innovation machine; title: An uncommon supply chain; title: Local multinational; title: A manufacturing manifesto.