Once again, Honda gets it right.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Honda-makes-money-others-hope-apf-969873985.html?x=0&sec=topStories&pos=3&asset=&ccode=

This article posted on Yahoo Finance tells the story of another Honda success story. While all the other auto makers are losing money, Honda made a profit. Honda turned a profit because consumers buy Honda vehicles. Consumers want to buy Honda vehicles because Honda figured out a long time ago that to win, they need to make the products people want to buy.

My first hand experience dealing with Honda began in 1986. I was a new graduate with an electrical engineering degree from Arizona State University. I had just left Motorola and joined a small defense contractor that needed a Japanese-speaking engineer to help with the development of a new product for the auto industry—airbags.

My first responsibility was to learn how to adapt the airbag products the company was making for the US Big 3 to match Honda’s expectations. I was young, excited, and full of passion for the challenge. I was assigned to work closely with a seasoned sales guy who had developed a great relationship with Honda. The first task he assigned to me seemed rather simple. We had received a list of technical questions from the engineers at Honda R&D and it was my job to walk around and talk with the core experts within the company and compile the answers so they could be communicated back to Honda. It all seemed simple enough. After I had worked with the experts and collected all the requested information, I was to go back and review with Sales and then we’d fax (email didn’t exist at the time) the information to Honda.

I went about busily meeting with the experts and collecting all the information I needed to answer Honda’s questions and attempted to learn everything possible about the product. I talked with the engineers who were working with our US domestic automaker customers. I used the same information they had used in their work with those companies and then ran some additional product tests and gathered the results.

Then we faxed the information to Honda R&D. To my amazement, I found that the answers I sent only spawned more questions. Being new and inexperienced, I went back again to my domestic counterparts in search of the additional information requested by Honda – it didn’t exist.

I now had to dig deeper. I found that the only way I would ever get the information I needed to answer Honda’s questions was to work with the designers and to then conduct the testing needed to derive the information myself. Wow! Honda didn’t accept anything that wasn’t backed up with reason and a lot of data. We had to do technical engineering work to understand the physics and principles involved in order to answer their questions. A mere statement of test results was not acceptable to them.

Honda’s company philosophy drives its engineers to understand what the customer wants – and to satisfy it. In everything they do the first question is always “how will it affect the customer?” The results are that while they don’t really understand the underlying detail, consumers have learned that Honda makes great cars that provide long term value.

Life and business have an interesting way of throwing curve balls; you always have to stay flexible to adjust your swing.

Several months ago, I was living in Tokyo and working in the furiously paced auto industry. Then back to the US, now in San Diego jumping new hurdles in the Defense industry. In between, and still, maintaining entrepreneurial activity. Which brought me to a lunch time conversation today at In-n-Out Burger with an 87 year old retired Navy sailor. He was assigned to the USS Lexington, an aircraft carrier that left Pearl Harbor on….Dec 5th, 1941 - a few days later and he would not have been there today to tell me his story.

After a near miss at Pearl Harbor, his carrier before long became the first to be sunk in World War II, hit by 5 torpedoes and a few bombs, the ship was disabled and then sunk. Assigned to another ship, that too was struck, this time by a Kamikaze plane. When I gave him a heartfelt thank you for his service to our country, he shrugged it off saying he was just a stupid young kid who didn’t know any better. He went on to finish a long career in the service. To me he is a great man.

So how is all that related to real life principles for developing products? When I began writing this blog I thought the principles I learned from the Japanese applied to more industries than autos, now I’m confident. In the auto world, companies live and die by the speed they can bring product to market – and actually end up with consumer preference in their favor. The military world is a little different; the customer is … the government. The production volume is on the order a few to a few thousand – over a 10 year time period. But design misses can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and can literally affect human life.

The very same “prove by design” vs. “prove by test” principles are touched upon and missed in both industries. It comes down to this – real principles don’t change because of circumstances or time. They are the same no matter what.