44 THE NO SCOLD GUARANTEE

One day in 1914, in a small Japanese town, a little boy called Soichiro saw a noisy,moving dust cloud out of which suddenly appeared an automobile. It was the first car the eight-year-old boy had ever seen and he started running after it.

It was an early edition Model T Ford, and many years later and now Chairman of his own motor car company, Soichiro Honda would fondly recall: “It leaked oil, I got down on my hands and knees to smell it. It was like perfume”.

Some years later, in September 1946, the now grown up Soichiro visited the home of a friend, Kenzaburo Inuka. There, by chance, he came upon a small engine which had been originally designed for a No. 6 wireless radio used by the former Imperial Army. Soichiro thought he could see another completely different use for it.

He immediately set to work on a prototype for a motorised bicycle. He took a Japanese-style hot water bottle and used it as the fuel tank. Initially he attached the engine to the front of the bicycle, but following numerous blow-outs of the front tyres, he remodelled using a more conventional engine layout with a V belt driving the rear wheel.

Among his first test riders for this new improved machine was a woman, but not just any woman. No, Honda asked his wife, Sachi to try the machine.

She recalls: “‘I’ve made one of these, so you try riding it.’ That was what my husband said when he brought one of his machines to the house.

“Later, he claimed that he made it because he couldn’t stand to watch me working so hard at pedalling my bicycle when I went off looking for food to buy, but that was just a story he made up afterward to make it sound better – although that might have been a little part of it.

“Mainly, though, I think he really wanted to know whether a woman could handle his bike. I was his guinea pig. He made me drive all over the main streets that were crowded with people, so I wore my best monpe [baggy trousers worn by farm women and female labourers] when I took the bike.”

When she returned she had a bone to pick with him, though it wasn’t about being used as a guinea pig but rather it was about the performance of the bike.

“After riding around for a good while, I went back to the house and my best monpe had gotten all covered with oil. I told him, this is no good. Your customers will come back and scold you.

“His usual response was, ‘Oh, be quiet. Don’t fuss about it.’ But instead, this time he said, ‘Hmm, maybe so.’

“He was unusually submissive about it.”

And the reason for that submissiveness was that Honda was already thinking about how to find and solve the problem.

Honda identiied that the reason for the soiling was some of the fuel/oil mixture used to power the engine was being blown back through the carburettor.

He dismantled every engine on every one of his first batch of bikes, checked them all, reassembled them with the best carburettors he could find and then as a final touch gave them all a test ride before selling them.

It was the earliest version of today’s inished vehicle delivery inspections, and a guarantee that his customers wouldn’t be coming back to scold him as his wife had done.

And the moral is that early prototyping can identify early problems. How soon in your innovation process do you develop real prototypes?