Soichiro Honda
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Founders · #423 Soichiro Honda
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How Did One Letter Sign Up 5,000 Honda Dealers?
David Senra says there is no Honda without Takeo Fujisawa, the partner who stopped the company running out of money. Reading Sol Sanders, he says Soichiro Honda was happy that a thing of his own invention was useful and was not paying much attention to profits. He gave motorcycles on credit. Months later the buyer had disappeared or the shop had gone out of business. Honda was facing bankruptcy because many of the products sold were never paid for.
Fujisawa made the wholesale shops pay up front and built a distribution network from scratch. Fewer than 200 bicycle shops and other distributors carried the product. He wrote a letter to 18,000 bicycle shop owners. The letter said their fathers
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Why Did Toyota Send Back Soichiro Honda's Piston Rings?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Toyota sent back 47 of about 50 piston rings because Soichiro Honda's first manufacturing was done by hand and could not hold a consistent quality. Honda had pushed the repair shop toward manufacturing piston rings, then moved into the factory. He lived and worked there day and night. When he could not stay awake he lay down on a straw mat on the floor. Senra sets that beside James Dyson's line that anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, and that Dyson's first cyclonic vacuum was built from cereal packets and masking tape before he understood how it worked.
The rejected rings made Honda a disciple of interchangeability and automation. H
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Why Did Soichiro Honda Obsess Over Engines?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda's obsession with engines started before he was in school. A mill about four kilometers from his house had a motor, a rare object then. Taken there on his grandfather's back, he was fascinated by the sound, the blue smoke, and the peculiar smell of oil. From those days he felt exhilaration just looking at and listening to motors. Senra notes Honda was not yet 10, and the same obsession was still there in his 70s.
The first automobile he ever saw fixed the aim. He ran after the car, caught up, and hung on to the rear. When it stopped, oil dripped onto the ground. He put his nose down, took deep breaths of the smell, and rubbed the oil over
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Why Does Soichiro Honda Say Success Is 1% of the Work?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda treated success as 1% of the work and the other 99% as failure. Success, in Honda's words, can only be achieved through repeated failure, and only by facing challenges with a pioneer spirit. Senra connects that to the Edisonian principle Honda shared with James Dyson: learn by doing, fail and fail again, then succeed.
Honda's other rule was that technology should serve people. Technology is a tool for a better life, and nothing more. Some people mistake the means for the end and treat scientific technology itself as the goal. Honda thought that was dangerous and wrong, including the tendency to put the machine ahead of the person using i
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Why Did Soichiro Honda Refuse to Partner With Chrysler and General Motors?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda refused to partner with Chrysler or General Motors because a special genius in the company had to be preserved, and the center of that genius was research. Most competitors were merging or partnering. Mitsubishi partnered with Chrysler. Isuzu partnered with General Motors. Honda did not.
The basic principle of the research program was respect for humanity. A need comes first, and technology is only the means to reach it. Development quality did not rest only on the money spent or the number of people. What mattered was what sat in people's brains. Research was run so everybody enjoyed the work and stayed enthusiastic. If their brains are
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Why Did Soichiro Honda Make Research a Separate Company?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda made research a separate company because more than 99% of Honda research is total failure, and left inside the parent company it would have been treated like a stepchild. That company's purpose is the pursuit of profits.
The split followed a trip to the Isle of Man, then the top motorcycle race. German and Italian machines with the same number of cylinders had three times the horsepower. Honda came back discouraged, then decided to concentrate on research and find out why. He reorganized the company, set up a special research organization, gave it independent status, and made it a separate company. Good research cannot be an appendage on
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Why Did Honda Use the Slogan You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Honda used the slogan "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" because the company first had to change the image of the motorbike. It advertised in Time and Life. Motorcycles then meant a rider was rough, dangerous, and perhaps even a criminal. The company fought the picture of the motorcycle as a plaything for juvenile delinquents and as the mark of a black leather gang. Lack of familiarity was not the main barrier. The problem was social acceptance of motorcycles as serious transportation, and the largest market was American, so the fight started there.
Honda's ads did not set out to sell their own products. They sold motorcycling. Illustrations put s
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Why Couldn't Soichiro Honda Pay for the Machine Tools?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda could not pay for the machine tools because he leveraged the company to buy them and Japan then went into a deep recession. He had spent heavily on high-quality tools, something like 10 times the company's entire assets, on the belief that high-quality products could not be made without high-quality tools. Even if the company went bankrupt after importing the machines, he did not think that was squandering resources, because the machines would remain and keep working. He chose to import up-to-date machinery rather than fall behind.
A supporter inside the main creditor bank convinced the rest of the bank not to foreclose. He was trying to
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What Is the Best Selling Motor Vehicle Ever?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says the Honda Cub is the best selling motor vehicle of all time. Soichiro Honda designed it after deciding the Dream had gone too narrow.
Demand for the Dream was moderate. The machine was heavy and expensive, and a motorcycle then was built for a small group of enthusiasts, the exclusive cult of motorcyclists. Honda wanted something simpler that anybody could use, including people afraid of motorcycles. He concluded he must make a motorcycle able to substitute for the bicycle, which had overwhelming popularity in Japan in the post-war days. He set out to design a smaller engine of his own, and the model was called the Cub. He was conceited enough to think
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How Did Soichiro Honda Build His First Motorbike?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says Soichiro Honda built his first motorbike because crowded trains and buses were unbearable and a gasoline shortage made it impossible to drive his car. He fitted a military gasoline motor, the kind once used to run generators for radios, onto a bicycle.
Transportation of any kind was desperately needed after World War II, and the makeshift motorbike was an instant success. When the surplus military motors were exhausted, he decided to design and build a motor for the bicycle. Relatives and friends criticized the business. Some said he should open a garage, since automobiles were bound to increase rapidly in Japan. Critics said a motorbike was only somet
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How Long Has the Honda Super Cub Been in Production?
David Senra, reading Sol Sanders, says the Honda Super Cub has stayed in constant, uninterrupted production for over 60 years, and Honda has sold over 100 million Super Cubs.
Once Soichiro Honda designed, engineered, and manufactured the Super Cub, he never stopped improving it. A main idea for improving the product was keeping the company useful. He was obsessed with Honda maintaining youthfulness, which meant hiring young people and giving them a chance. One factor in his decision to retire from direct leadership was his belief that the technological demands of the new products were beyond him. While he ran Honda, he considered himself just an employee of his own company and worked elbow