Interesting read....
One reason for the success of Honda as an
automobile maker in the US is its unconventional approach to hiring key
executives. In this excerpt from his new book, Driving Honda: Inside the
World’s Most Innovative Car Company, Jeffrey Rothfeder describes how
Honda concluded that a former Marine Reservist would make a great
manager.
Sam Fluker is a man who easily commands respect. He's
about 30 years old, large and imposing, a former Marine Reserve. But
it's not just his bearing that compels people to listen to what he
says. It is also his dark eyes, determined and searing.
At the Honda plant in Lincoln, Alabama, where he is an
inventory control manager, Fluker supervises upward of 300 people, who
log, inspect, and dispatch supply parts into the factory as they
arrive in a steady stream by day and night.
Fluker, who is black, grew up in the Lincoln area, in a
lower middle-class neighborhood, and graduated from Auburn University
about two hours south of his hometown with a degree in systems
engineering.
He never expected to work in an automobile factory.
Rather, upon finishing college, he envisioned a life as an officer
in the Marines, and if he eventually did work in the private sector,
it would be in the supply chain of a clean business like Walmart or
in a relatively light industry like textile manufacturing.
But that tidy plan changed when he met Honda
recruiters at an Auburn job fair in his senior year. By this point,
Fluker was in his early twenties, married, and his wife was pregnant;
he was a bit overwhelmed by his responsibilities but felt that
his military aspirations would provide a smooth transition into a
relatively stable career in which he didn't have to worry about losing
his job and his income.
Upon meeting Fluker at the fair, the Honda executives
imagined his future differently. The Lincoln factory, the most
advanced in Honda's portfolio, would open in August 2001, within the
next year, and the automaker was looking for dependable, self-reliant,
meticulous, principled, and creatively thoughtful people to work there.
Experience in the auto industry -- or any knowledge of
auto manufacturing, for that matter -- was not a requirement;
conscientiousness, an independent disposition and assiduousness were.
Fluker had these characteristics in spades.
In a series of interviews for the job at Honda, Fluker
was asked about his home life and his goals, his hobbies and his
passions, how he would address specific personal challenges at work
involving coworkers -- belligerence, bullying, undercutting and
tattling, for example -- more than he was queried about his knowledge
of logistics and supply chains or his unfamiliarity with the
automobile sector.
As the interviews progressed it became clear to him that
Honda would make him an offer that would ultimately lead to a
management role.
"I think I got them with my work ethic and my personal
story of what I achieved on my own -- to be a senior in college,
working a full-time job, having a wife, a baby on the way, and being a
Marine. And I was honest to a fault with them. I didn't even think I
wanted the job, so I had nothing to lose,” said Fluker.
"In fact, it probably would have been easier if I didn't
get the job so I could just do the plan I had in mind for myself.
Turns out, that's exactly the kind of person they love to hire."
Indeed, Honda’s hiring and employee promotion
practices, like so many aspects of the company, defy logic — at
least of the sort that most other organizations subscribe to.
The unorthodox ways that Honda chooses employees — and the unorthodox
employees that Honda chooses—stand in sharp contrast to typical auto
industry practices.
Most automobile manufacturing jobs are filled by people
who evince a love for vehicles, some technical knowledge about cars and
the personality to follow directions closely, whether in a lean
Japanese factory or a less disciplined American plant — a formula
that Honda perceives as limiting and lacking in imagination.
Instead, Honda seeks workers who have charted an
irregular course, whose path in life has been a bit odd and
unconventional. And the farther they’ve strayed from the auto
industry — and are free of the preexisting biases about how automobile
manufacturing should be done — the better. “We want independent
people, who can see auto manufacturing with fresh eyes, not blind
followers,” said Honda CEO Takanobu Ito on many occasions.
Ito’s comment is a sanitized and more practical version
of the qualification that Soichiro Honda said he looked for when
making hiring decisions, according to lean expert James Womack,
coauthor of The Machine That Changed the World. Asked for the single
most important attribute that an ideal Honda applicant should have,
Soichiro noted that he preferred “people who had been in trouble.”
Soichiro was obviously being cheeky. But not entirely so.
In only a slightly roundabout way, he was articulating Honda Motor’s
third critical organizational principle: respect individuals and,
more precisely, individualism.
Since the company’s founding, Honda has stood alone
in aggressively questioning and then often breaking the rules for how a
successful industrial outfit should behave. That contrarian streak
has gotten Honda into uncomfortable feuds with, for example, the
Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which Honda
defied upon making and then exporting its first cars, and with rival
Japanese companies in calling for trade liberalization that would
permit more imports of products from global rivals.
Moreover, that attitude has drawn skepticism (undue, as it
turns out) after some of Honda's more outrageous departures from the
norm, such as the decision as a start-up to construct its own dies
and stamping equipment (and since then virtually all of its factory
hardware and software), its longshot entries against established
companies in world-class motorcycle and Formula l races, or its
confidence that it could build an engine that cleared the
Environmental Protection Agency's pollution standard before any other
carmakers.
Such untempered innovation in ideas and practice can
only be achieved with employees who, in fact, wouldn't flourish --
who would, in Soichiro's words, be in trouble -- in organizational
models constructed primarily around rules and structured systems, no
matter how progressively or intelligently plotted, Honda believes. Or
put positively, an individual who can thrive in paradox and
contradiction, who would instinctively explore the way things are
traditionally done expressly to contradict them -- who, in fact, sees a
glass not as half full or half empty, but as twice the size that
it needs to be and considers designing a vessel with different
dimensions -- would be a suitable Honda candidate.
In this, as in many other ways, Honda views itself as
the mirror image of Toyota, its oldest rival. In a recent interview
with me, Womack recalled a wonderfully humorous conversation he had
with Shoichiro Irimajiri, who ran Honda's North American operations in
the 1980s, in which Irimajiri depicted the personalities of the two
giant Japanese automakers through colorful descriptions of their
employees.
“'I will now imitate Toyota man,'" Womack remembered
Irimajiri saying. "At which point Irimajiri puts on blinders and then
proceeds to walk straight into the wall and fall down. He said, 'Ah,
Toyota man. Very, very good in a straight line. But no peripheral
vision, like the Roman legions.’ ”
Then, Irimajiri said, according to Womack: “‘Ah, now,
Honda man.’ Without the blinders, Irimajiri’s down crouching behind
the furniture and he’s running around from one side of the room to
the other, and he says, ‘Honda man, guerrilla fighter. Honda man loves
chaos. Toyota man hates, hates chaos.’ ”
Honda’s off kilter approach to hiring—its belief that
each individual must actively redefine the contours of his or her
job rather than the other way around—has produced some eyebrow-raising
employment policies, starting at the very top.
Each of Honda’s CEOs came up through the company’s
engineering ranks. And all of them at some time were former chiefs
of the automaker’s prized autonomous research and development unit.
That’s an extraordinary record: conventional wisdom among
multinationals holds that the most effective chief executives are
specialists in marketing, sales, or perhaps accounting, anything but
engineering. As a result, even CEOs in technologically based
industries, like pharmaceuticals or computer hardware and software,
tend to know little about designing or manufacturing the products that
they sell.
