An average Nigerian business focuses on Nigeria as its biggest forecast during the business conception; it will not be a surprise that we are all surrounded by international businesses and Nigeria majorly exports religion and arts. In Technology, innovative branding and concepts, we are doing a very big part in consuming and our graduates are trained in maintaining infrastructure. I wonder why a first class students get a job that handsomely pays him/her to fill excel documents. They said school is only to teach us the art of learnability, what exactly are we learning in these industries. It is not as if we actually can invent their technology.
Let us look around, we have mirage of the actual facts; these companies that we want to die for today all started through individuals that broke boundaries. Today we would rather get paid being unproductive than to start thinking of innovative processes. Companies should give you technical experience as much as administrative.
Our environment is saturated with music, crusades, religion, parties, socials during the weekends and then we work like mules during the weekdays for a company that will sack you and not feel a drop in their revenue because all the assignment given to you do not ask for your creativity, you are simply commanded to do as you are told. So where then is the productivity in our economy?
The world is extending technological barriers, Ger Jansen; a Dutch engineer is busy producing the technology behind levitating objects, Keith Gunura, the 29-year old CEO and co-founder of noonee, is also working on how to create an invisible chair. Enough of complaining, start creating the future!!
Honda is a known as the company that produces cars and Ducati for its production in bikes, it will be shocking to know that the biggest sales of bikes in the world right now goes to Honda having sold amount 13 million bikes to Asian market and about 150,000 to the American soil.
Perhaps one of the men I particularly loved is Soichiro Honda who had an interest in automobiles. He worked as a mechanic at the Art Shokai garage, tuning cars to be used for car racing. In 1937, he got financial aid from his acquaintance called Kato Shichirō and founded Tōkai Seiki (Eastern Sea Precision Machine Company) to make piston rings working out of the Art Shokai garage and even failed times and times again. They were even with the failures able to secure a contract to supply piston rings to Toyota, but lost the contract due to the poor quality of their products. Ideally I would have said here that Engineering was not even his calling but he persisted.
He attended engineering school without even graduating.
Then instead of complaining about the country economy, he sought after experience to succeed, you can never become a star by relying solely on your own experience and this was what he did. He visited several factories around Japan to better understand Toyota’s quality control processes, by 1941 Honda was able to mass-produce piston rings acceptable to the same Toyota that rejected his engine, using an automated process that could employ even unskilled wartime laborers!!! Now tell me that there is no reward in persistence to perfection.
Tōkai Seiki was placed under control of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry at the start of World War II, and Soichiro Honda was demoted from president to senior managing director after Toyota took a 40% stake in the company. I am sure you believe this is the worst that can happen.
Just when he thought he was through hell, A US bomber attack destroyed Tōkai Seiki’s Yamashita plant in 1944, and the Itawa plant collapsed in the 1945 Mikawa earthquake, and Soichiro. Where you are probably seeing the end now, Honda saw a future because where he wanted to be has not changed with the circumstance he was going through. Honda sold the salvageable remains of the company to Toyota after the war, and used the proceeds to found the Honda Technical Research Institute in October 1946. With just a staff of 12 men, he built and sold improvised motorized bicycles.
Today this Japanese company is the largest manufacturer of motorcycles and internal combustion engine in the whole world and again the eight largest manufacturer of automobile. The strength of 12 workers then has increased today to about 200,000 in 2013.
The motto for Honda still remains “The power of dreams”. The world is still hoping and waiting on your dreams, you are welcome to create the reality.