[radiator]

Tetsuo Sakiya - Honda Motor the men, the management, the machines

Tangential: there are many books on the Toyota system, so that they have stolen the show. I have always suspected that other Japanese factories might have also had interesting production systems but only found the above book about Honda. Honda apparently invested more in R&D and always took greater risks than Toyota. I believe some ideas from there can also be applied to IT.

Anyone know of others?

[mjul]

The Honda Myth by Masaaki Sato is an excellent book about Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa and the captivating history of how they built Honda, from motorcycles to Formula 1 and how they disrupted the US auto industry on the way with the low-emission fuel-efficient CVCC engine (the later Tesla story shares some of the same elements of new tech playing to environmental regulation).

It was driven by the quest to create the best engines and fastest vehicles.

Soichiro Honda had a great love for building and tuning his engines, saying something like, “It will be a sad day if engineers could go to lunch without needing to wash their hands”.