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.