Tetsuo Sakiya's 1982 study of Honda Motor, tracing the company's evolution from Soichiro Honda's postwar bicycle-engine workshop into a global automaker. Written by a Japanese business journalist, it focuses on the founders' management style — particularly the partnership between Soichiro Honda (the engineering visionary) and Takeo Fujisawa (the business and organizational mind who handled everything Honda had no interest in). The book covers the development of the Super Cub and the company's audacious entry into the automobile market against Japan's established automakers, and it is the standard reference for understanding how Honda Motor was built as an institution, not just how Soichiro Honda built as an engineer.
This book's particular value for founders is its portrait of the Honda–Fujisawa partnership — one of the great founder–COO duos in business history. Soichiro Honda was a self-taught machinist with no interest in management, finance, or organisational structure; Fujisawa was the disciplined business mind who gave structure to Honda's chaos. Founders episode #423 frames Soichiro as a maverick who rejected Japanese corporate hierarchy and was judged purely on results, and Sakiya's book shows how that culture was institutionalized. For a founder who is strong on vision and weak on administration, the Honda–Fujisawa model is a useful template: find your Fujisawa, give them real authority, and accept that the company needs a manager as much as it needs a founder.