Honda

Honda Wants Your Love

I attended a private dinner hosted by a wealthy Japanese businessman to foster increased cultural awareness between the Japanese and American business communities. For several years, this businessman had hosted this wonderful event at a private club in Los Angeles, but this evening was to be the last as he had decided to retire to Japan and spend more time traveling for pleasure with his wife. To round off what was an absolutely delightful evening, a senior executive from the Honda Corporation was invited to give a brief talk on the subject of Honda's phenomenal growth from a third rate automotive company 30 years ago to an automotive powerhouse. The presentation offered so many valuable insights into Honda's corporate culture that every business school in the country would probably benefit from the lessons he shared. But one point struck a deeper cord for me than I expected at the outset of the evening. The speaker explained that at Honda they take a three day egalitarian retreat where both senior and lower level managers are invited to discuss every aspect of the company business philosophy and corporate vision.



What I found particularly fascinating was that one of the more important topics discussed at these retreats is the topic of love, more specifically, the nature of love. At first blush, the idea of a group of Japanese businessmen sitting in a steam room discussing the nature of love might elicit a chuckle until you recall that out of these retreats came a business model that in about 40 years transformed a small automotive company into a multinational automotive juggernaut that has now surpassed Nissan in Japan and Chrysler in the United States.



The reason so much of the retreat is devoted to the nature of love is because they have discovered that if you understand what makes a person love their car you know what your research and development focus should be. Soichiro Honda, the founder of Honda Motor Company, was a self-taught engineer who dropped out of school to take an apprenticeship at an automobile servicing company. In 1946 after World War II he founded the Honda Technical Research Institute and shortly thereafter founded Honda Motor Company. Because he is an engineer by training, forward thinking research and development has always been a key to Honda's success and profitability. During the speech we were told that this line of inquiry allows Honda to envision what customers will want in car 5, 10, even 20 years from now. And here's the key-the retreat doesn't work unless you really debate what love really means. This is not some fluff exercise until you get to the real business at hand.


When I say debate, I mean screaming matches that leave people really pissed off at the end of day one. When I say debate, I mean people not being able to sit next to each other day two because they are still trying to cool down from day one. But by day three they gained insights that changed the lives of millions. According to the speaker, when he presented to American automotive executives at the big three automakers and asked what American consumers might want 10 years from now the rooms invariably went silent.