Mr. Iacocca, Meet Mr, Honda

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Although perhaps the best of his breed, Iacocca of Detroit never showed anything like the seat-of-the-pants marketing genius of Honda of Tokyo. His great triumph, the Mustang, was essentially a styling innovation; as a piece of engineering, it was little more than an adaptation of earlier models. His greatest failure, the Pinto, was a corporate nightmare. According to a detailed article published in 1977 by the magazine Mother Jones, Iacocca discouraged any talk of delaying production of the Pinto to deal with basic safety flaws. "Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days," an engineer who worked on the car told the magazine. "With Lee, it was taboo. Whenever a problem was raised that meant a delay on the Pinto, Lee would chomp on his cigar, look out the window, and say, 'Read the product objectives and get back to work." According to Mother Jones, the Pinto's defective gas tank eventually caused from 500 to 900 burn deaths.

Now at Chrysler, Iacocca's lack of interest in making a first-class subcompact continues. Instead of trying to develop one on his own, Iacocca has embarked upon a joint venture with his supposed blood enemies, most notably Tokyo's Mitsubishi Motors Corp. Chrysler advertisements, in fact, have boasted that the company's cars are the work of "the master car builders of Japan."

Honda's approach could not have been more different. Rather than advertise someone else as a "master car builder," Honda insisted on becoming one. He dedicated his company to producing the best-engineered and best-constructed automobile possible. In fact, so obsessed was Honda with quality that he would dog the workers on the assembly line, sometimes screaming over the slightest quality problem. "Mr Thunder," as he was known by the employees, once even stripped naked before his engineers to assemble a motorcycle engine. On another occasion, infuriated by what he felt was incompetence on the line, he struck a laggard worker with a wrench.

"I have been very servere, [because] we are not selling clothing or apparel. We are selling things that can affect customers' lives," Honda insists. "If a small thing like a bolt or a nut goes wrong, the customer's life is in jeopardy. That is why I regard even the tiniest bolt and nut as very important factors for the protection of our customers. As far as work is concerned, I never make any compromise."

Small thing: Lee Iacocca established a foundation to raise money for the refurbishing of the Statute of Liberty. Honda used his own fortune to establish a large foundation in Japan to promote car safety.

Maybe one reason Honda feels so keenly about safety, and has such a good sense about the consumer, is that he has never lost touch with ordinary people. While Iacocca inhabits the world of elite Detroit suburbs, million-dollar bonuses, private jets, and swanky New York parties -- the "royal class" as he once called it -- Honda prefers to mix it up with the hoi polloi. It is not uncommon to find him in the red-light district of Tokyo, hanging out with the geishas, drinkers, gamblers, and tourists. Though his age has now forced him to cut down on his carousing, he believes it has been helpful in learning about his customers.

"I have never belonged to any secluded society," Honda explains. "I associate with anybody -- rich, poor, it doesn't make a difference. . . . I prefer to have the principle of egalitarianism rather than a class distinction of people.

"The most important thing in the world is not diamonds or gold, but humans. And everbody has to learn about humans. In order to do that, we have to have broad contact."

Honda's insistence on broad contact with consumers extends to broad contact with employees. "We make no distinction between manual workers and white-collar workers. You can see it for yourself if you visit out plant in Ohio, where everybody from the president to the youngest member of the company dines at the same cafeteria, eating the same food. And we don't have an executive dining room."

There is the revealing story told of the time, several years ago, that Honda was entertaining a customer at a Tokyo drinking establishment when the customer accidentally dropped his dentures into a septic tank. Everyone felt sorry for the man, but nobody wanted to retrieve his dentures. So it was Honda, already a man of stature in Japan, who went in after the mouthpiece arms first. "Nobody wanted to pick it up, not even the owner of that particular restaurant or the employees," Honda recalls. "I did it because . . . I wanted to show a good example. If you are a manager, if you are a top man of a corporation, you've got to lead others by showing good examples."

It's hard to imagine Lee Iacocca, dressed to the nines for an evening with his friend Donald Trump, getting his hands soiled in such a way. Indeed, Iacocca's notion of leadership reflects a sort of macho elitism, a desire, as he once put it, to be "numero uno . . . or no dice." But there is a limit to how much such egoism can accomplish. During the dark days at Chrysler in the late 1970s, certainly Iacocca's aggressive self-promotion gave the failing company some much needed pizzazz. But now that the balance sheet is in order, Iacocca, at 62, has in some ways become bigger than the company he heads. What will happen to Chrysler after Iacocca is now a matter of some troubling speculation.

Certainly Soichiro Honda, in his prime, was no less a dominating personality. But his style of leadership has allowed the company to flourish well after his departure from active management. A thoroughgoing individualist, Honda successfully created a firm built around other individualists -- a company capable of duplicating his spirit. A company research-and-development subsidiary was established so that young innovators could develop their ideas without the sort of senior staff interference that often stifles creativity in Japanese business. And the board of directors long ago learned to make its decisions without consulting the company founder: some 10 years before he retired in 1973, Honda encouraged the directors' independence by declining to attend their meetings.

Honda Motor Co. today is a company of remarkable vitality, with sales that have more than tripled over the past decade. A clever and bombastic marketeer from Detroit wants you to believe that the unfair trade practices of the Japanese account for much of that success. A soft-spoken entrepreneur from Tokyo knows it isn't so.

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