Silicon Valley is the place that springs to mind when we think about entrepreneurs and garages. But long before Steve Jobs another great misunderstood talent began realising his dreams from the confines of his own garage: Soichiro Honda, the founder of the company of the same name.
What have dreams got to do with Soichiro Honda and the Honda Motor Company?
The most ardent motorbike and car fans know all too well and would reply in unison “The Power of Dreams”, citing the Japanese company’s historic slogan. This is because for Soichiro Honda nothing was as important as doggedly following his dreams. It may seem no more than a simple catchphrase but the history of the Japanese company shows that it has actually been anything but.
The garage as a workshop for learning and dreaming big
Born in 1906, as a young man Soichiro Honda was literally always in the garage. In fact, as well as going to school, during the day he worked in a workshop that repaired bicycles, staying after closing time to develop his project for elastic bands to sell to the Toyota Corporation.
“Dreams give life meaning. That’s why I will continue to set myself new challenges until I die. We must make our dreams come true.”
After a year without sleeping, up to his elbows in grease, Soichiro presented his project to Toyota: the elastic bands were rejected while Soichiro failed to graduate because of his regular absences from school.
Give up? No way.
Humiliated and discouraged, Soichiro rolled his sleeves up and got over his first failure.
After two even more intense years his project was purchased by the Toyota Corporation enabling him to open his own business, which was very successful right away. But fate was to conspire against him: his factory was razed to the ground by bombs and at the end of the Second World War he was so poor that he couldn’t afford petrol for his car.
Another garage, an even bigger dream
Having lost everything, Soichiro returned to the workshop and got his thoughts in order. The key question he asked himself was: “How can I use the things I already have to get where I want to go?” Given the lack of petrol in Japan and thanks to the availability of some military waste – around 500 portable generators fitted with little engines – he came up with the idea of mounting these motors on bicycles: the Honda Dream Type A was born. Increasingly a believer in the power of radical innovations driven by anti-conformism, in 1946 he founded the Honda Technical Research Institute, which in 1948 became the Honda Motor Company.
The Power of Dreams
Today Honda is one of the biggest companies in the world, employing over 100,000 people in the US, Europe and Japan. Honda’s success is a result of the talent, for too long misunderstood, of a man who refused to give up, who continued to better himself and to better his products. There have been failures along the way, of course, but they have always simply been seen as new opportunities.