本田汽车比丰田更胜一筹?

Think of a successful Japanese car maker and you'll probably think of Toyota. After all it's the world's number one auto manufacturer renowned for its lean production system. But American journalist Jeffrey Rothfeder thinks this popular assumption is all wrong. He reckons the real star of the Japanese car industry is Honda, not Toyota. And he's written a whole book about it called Driving Honda after he was allowed behind Honda's famously private doors. So I asked him what did he find.
谈到日本汽车行业的佼佼者，你或许会想到丰田，因为它毕竟是世界上首屈一指的汽车生产商，并且以其精益生产系统而闻名。但是美国记者Jeffrey Rothfeder则并不认同这个民间广泛流传的说法。他认为日本汽车产业里真正的明星是本田而非丰田。在他有幸进入一向含蓄排外本田公司一探究竟之后，他甚至写了整整一本书，名叫《Driving Honda》，用以阐述自己的看法。那么现在他正在接受我的采访，告诉我他所发现的东西。

What Honda does is they essentially set up operations wherever they go, and give them virtually total autonomy to be a local citizen, to basically be a localised company. So it's a very decentralised structure that most multinationals won't even attempt, because most multinationals like to have, like Toyota for example, like to have a very centralised structure. Decisions that Toyota makes in Japan are the ones to get passed around the world, and anything has to be approved through Japan.
本田公司运转的精髓就是他们每到一个地方都会重新建立起一套经营方式，并且让他们几乎全权自治成为当地企业。这个去中心化的结构式大多数跨国公司所不敢尝试的，因为大多数跨国公司包括丰田都更偏爱权力集中的管理模式。丰田公司日本总部所做的决定就是世界各地其他分部需要执行的，而分部的任何想法都要先经过日本总部的批准。

Where did that come from, that decentralised idea?
这种去中心化的想法是从何而来的呢？

It's really a small business, still run with the DNA of the founder all over the company. And Honda's always been sort of the startup, the company that had to do things on the cheap, that had to figure out ways to do things, that had to be a great engineering, a great innovation company. And that's what Soichiro Honda really put into the company.
本田其实是一个小公司，血液里还流淌着成立之初（小企业经营）的DNA。而且本田公司似乎一直都处于小公司启动阶段，这是一个需要精打细算、想尽一切办法的公司，他们注定有很强的技术能力和创新能力。而这也是最初本田宗一郎为公司灌注的精神。