LOS ANGELES -- American Honda is under pressure from top brass in Tokyo to repeat the run of success it enjoyed when sales boss **** Colliver and product chief Tom Elliott operated as a dynamic executive duo from 1993 to 2004.

Colliver and Elliott managed a delicate balancing act -- two operating heads working under a Japanese CEO who also was based at the company's Torrance, Calif., headquarters. But the system worked, and Honda's U.S. leaders are trying it again as they attempt to achieve sales goals set by their bosses in Japan.

In March, chief marketing officer Mike Accavitti was put in charge of automobile operations, adding responsibility for several key departments, including product planning. The pairing of Accavitti with John Mendel, executive vice president of sales, mirrors the successful structure Honda used in the Colliver-Elliott era.

Accavitti, 54, is a Dodge transplant who joined the company as the top marketer two years ago. He is a senior vice president under Mendel, 58, an executive vice president.

Accavitti has key new duties, but the sales goals are the direct responsibility of Mendel, who is finishing his eighth year at American Honda and his fourth as its top sales executive.

Honda's U.S. momentum was soured by three factors: the global recession; the 2011 Japanese earthquake that crippled Honda's manufacturing base and r&d centers; and the Thai floods that further damaged Honda's suppliers.

"Honda had been so miraculously successful for so long," Mendel said. "What we learned [in the crisis] from what was thrown at us, our leadership evolved at all levels and stood up."


Accavitti

Orders from Japan

With U.S. auto sales bouncing back, Mendel has a fresh set of orders from Japan: top American Honda's 2007 peak of 1.55 million U.S. sales this year, up from 1.42 million last year, and help push Honda's combined U.S., Canadian and Mexican sales past 2 million units by 2016, from 1.63 million in 2012.

American Honda's U.S. market share, including Acura, peaked at 11 percent in 2009. But when the Japanese earthquake hampered Honda operations, its share fell to 9 percent in 2011. It recovered to almost 10 percent last year and currently is running at 9.5 percent through June, even with last year's pace.

Much of Honda's growth is expected to come from higher sales of the Fit subcompact hatchback and crossover coming from a Celaya, Mexico, plant that opens next year.

Honda originally turned to a two-headed management structure when it hired Colliver away from Mazda in 1993. Colliver and Elliott operated for 11 years under American Honda CEO Koichi Amemiya. When Elliott retired in 2004, Mendel was hired away from Mazda to be Colliver's lieutenant for the next five years.

Colliver retired in 2009 and Mendel ascended to the top spot, but there was no American No. 2. Now Accavitti's duties and title make for a combo akin to the Colliver-Elliott team.

Not power-hungry

In an interview, Colliver said the results of the Mendel-Accavitti alliance will depend somewhat on their personalities.

"Tom didn't interfere in my job, and I didn't interfere in his," he recalled. "But we communicated a lot and asked each other for advice. Tom and I weren't power-hungry. We didn't need or want more responsibility."

And Colliver says Amemiya had a trusting, hands-off approach with his lieutenants, creating what Colliver called "the greatest network of communication I had ever seen in any company."

Whether current CEO Tetsuo Iwamura will give Mendel and Accavitti the same latitude is still to be seen -- especially since there has been more oversight from Japan, after the botched 2012 Civic launch and Acura's identity problems. But Honda Japan did recently give Iwamura and the U.S. executives more autonomy and authority in dictating their future direction.

"The U.S. is their cash cow, and they have to fix it," Colliver said.

When Elliott and Colliver teamed up in 1993, Honda was coming out of a scandal that ensnared others at the company. The U.S. Justice Department prosecuted more than 20 former Honda sales managers for accepting bribes from dealers seeking favorable treatment. And American Honda was selling fewer than 800,000 vehicles a year. When Elliott retired, the team had created a retail powerhouse on the cusp of 1.4 million units.

Player-coach

A Honda insider said there still is some internal uneasiness about the new management pairing. The executive said that Mendel is more of an executive delegator than Accavitti, who is known as a tough player in the trenches.

At some companies that's an ideal pairing -- if the executives are on the same page, and don't covet adding the other's responsibilities.

The two-headed management strategy does allow for coverage of the other executive's duties during time away from the office. Mendel discovered it is possible to be unplugged from the 24-7 world over Labor Day 2011, when he and his wife went on a week-long 35th anniversary rafting trip down the Grand Canyon, where there was no cellular phone service.

"The first day I was white-knuckling it a bit," Mendel said, referring more to BlackBerry withdrawal than whitewater rapids.

In an e-mail, Accavitti wrote that he "can't imagine a better business partner than John."

"I believe that John and I really complement each other in skill-set and management style," he wrote. "We come from similar career experiences; working for a Big 3 and having multiple international experiences while there. These similarities and differences make us a very strong team."

Mendel describes his style as that of "a player-coach. I like being hands-on, but not to hold your hand."

Not that Mendel is a soft touch. He has used the speaker's lectern at industry gatherings as a bully pulpit to push Honda's agenda in sometimes indelicate language, whether it's about yen-dollar exchange rates or inaccurate fuel-economy ratings.

Mendel says his partnership with Accavitti is not an exact replica of the Colliver-Elliott era. He described the management structure under Colliver and Elliott as a "glass barrier between sales and operations," which has had to evolve with the times.

"At the time it worked. There was a lot of autonomy," Mendel said. "Now we have a lot more collaboration structurally and in practice. We have a matrix where no one is saying, 'I got mine,' and punting responsibility to the next person."



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