Soichiro Honda

“So he was born in a remote village. His dad is a blacksmith, and one of his earliest memories is other people making people's lives better through engineering and technology. And so what he's describing is when lighting was first installed in his very poor and…”

“So he winds up selling like 50 piston rings to Toyota and they send 47 of them back to him.”

“Before the earthquake and the fire, the subsequent fires that come after the earthquake, that is, the shop employed 16 repairmen. After, only two were left. Honda was one of the two.”

“When he founds Honda, one of the principles in the founding of Honda was always start with the hardest problem first.”

“He developed a great interest in racing cars, their design, how to build them, and how to race them, which was to become basic to the success of the Honda organization later on. So he considered racing just R&D.”

“Had we left research in the parent company, it would have been treated like a stepchild. For that company's purpose is the pursuit of profits. Since good research cannot be treated as simply as an appendage on manufacturing, I decided that it would have to be …”

“If you study the career of Henry Ford, you just realize that, oh, he basically saw car, a car as wheels for a motor. The car was just the delivery mechanism for the motor. The motor was the center of gravity for his entire enterprise, just like it is for Honda…”

“The key lesson that James Dyson took from studying Honda was this framework that Dyson actually used throughout his career, and it was pretty straightforward. It was take an existing product, notice what's bad, clumsy, overcomplicated, or even ignored about th…”

“Honda made local headlines when he got into an argument with the tax office. Honda decided to have it out with tax officials. By getting a fire engine hose and dowsing officials as they came out of their building.”

“Honda was facing bankruptcy since many of the products it sold were just not being paid for. The shops he sold to on credit would never pay or they'd go out of business.”

“When Honda would concentrate on a goal, he would pay so much attention to it, and the company would concentrate on it so much that sales would fall off. Observers on the outside world would say that Honda was on the road to bankruptcy. When Honda then succeede…”

“Honda would have never succeeded if he didn't have the right partner, the right co-founder.”

“It was to be the first of over a hundred patents he would hold personally.”

“The organizational structure of a research institute is different from that of a manufacturing company. A research organization should be structured to enable individuals to make the best of their ability. Whereas a manufacturing company should be organized to…”

“The extra gasoline tanks from the US fighter planes dropped on these attacks, supplied him with needed precious and scarce metals. Honda called this dividend from the bombings Truman's gift.”

“By the time Honda was 25, the repair shop was earning a profit of a thousand yen a month, and he was employing 50 people.”

“Honda resisted suggestions that the company move into other fields. The company's products, he said, must have an engine.”

“I'm pretty sure he sells this company to Toyota from the sale of this piston ring company. He nets about a 125,000 dollars, and that gives him time to figure out what to do next.”