Take a look at your company’s slogan or your project’s slogan. What does it mean to you? Does it describe your mission, your challenges, and your ambitions? If you would describe the slogan in your own words, what would that sound like? 

This story is about a Japanese car manufacturer. No, not the one you think of. It’s not about production systems and lean manufacturing. It’s not about Toyota. No, this story is about Honda and how their slogan for a brand new car traveled through the company and finally ended up in a production car. This story is about the importance of understanding the company slogan and putting your, and your team’s own words into it and not just copy the slogan from the top management without understanding what it’s all about.

In 1978 Honda’s top management faced a challenge. Their two top models, the Honda Civic and the Honda Accord were becoming too familiar. This may not sound like a challenge, but with a new postwar generation entering the car market, the top management realized that they had to come up with a new car to attract this new generation. They kicked off the development of a new concept car, with a slogan describing their mission:

 “Let’s gamble”

The Honda top management knew very little about this postwar generation entering the market. They were also challenged by the next-generation product designers with unconventional ideas about what made a good car. What they did know was that they had to come up with a product concept fundamentally different from anything the company had ever done before. This was one of the two instructions that the top management charged the newly formed development team with. The second instruction given to the team was to make a car that was “inexpensive but not cheap”. These two instructions gave the young development team, with an average age of 27, an extremely clear sense of direction. For instance, early in the project, a proposal of designing a smaller and cheaper version of the Civic was turned down. The reason was simply that this approach contradicted the entire rationale of their mission of coming up with a fundamentally different product concept. The only way was to invent something completely new. The team leader of the development team, Hiroo Watanabe, expressed his sense of the team’s ambitious challenge in these words:

“Theory of Automobile Evolution”

The phrase “Theory of Automobile Evolution” posed a question: If the automobile were an organism, how should it evolve? The meaning of the phrase was argued and discussed among the team members, and they finally summarized their challenge in the form of a new slogan:

“Man-maximum, machine-minimum”

The phrase “Theory of Automobile Evolution” describes an ideal. The team believed that this ideal car would challenge the mindset of the traditional human-machine relationship without having to sacrifice comfort for appearance. They simply wanted to build a lighter and cheaper car, but also something more comfortable and solid than other traditional cars. The concept that the team eventually came up with was the image of a sphere – a car short in length and tall in height. Such a car provides room for the passenger while taking up a little amount of space on the road. The sphere also minimizes the space taken up by the engine and mechanical systems. The team called the product concept:

Tall Boy

The concept car, Tall Boy was developed by young people who were not afraid to go against the grain or stand up to friction within the organization. When Tall Boy got a green light to become a production car in February 1981, it was the team’s overwhelming enthusiasm that led to the on-the-spot decision to go ahead with the project. The Honda management let the young generation take care of Tall Boy. Nine months later and three and a half years after the “Let’s gamble” slogan was presented, the urban car, created by young people for young people, was presented as:

Honda City

The sales promotion activities for the City were just as powerful and unconventional as the product itself. The young people in the sales promotion team asked Madness, an English pop band with a unique style, to record the catchy tune “Honda, Honda, Honda”. The music together with the dance style became an instant hit at the product launch. Nearly 150.000 City cars were sold in the first two years after it’s launch, with a monthly sales peak of 16.000 units. Compared to Honda’s yearly sales goal of 300.000 cars, including all models that year, the City was a success. The powerful combination of product and image made quite an impact on the public in the first half of the 1980s, garnering numerous industry awards and mass media honors. The sales-promotion team was also acknowledged for their work, causing a sensation throughout the advertising industry. Eventually, the concept of the Tall Boy became something that contradicted the conventional idea about automobile design at the time. The car inaugurated a whole new approach to design in the Japanese auto industry based on the “man-maximum, machine-minimum” concept, which led to a new generation of tall and short cars.

Leadership

The glue between Honda’s top management and the project teams that made the “Let’s gamble”-slogan travel through the company in different shapes was leadership. Assigning a task to a team means not only delegating the actual tasks to the team but also having the team set their own view, with their own words. Teams usually don’t dare to do this with respect to the top management, resulting in teams copying the slogan to fit it into their daily work. Breaking down the slogan and rewrite it in your own words is a perfect way of understanding the team’s specific challenge and mission. When a team agrees on those things, it’s much easier to decide how their solution will look like to create the most value for the customer.