Henry Ford

8 Key excerpts on "Henry Ford"

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  Peter F. Drucker on Business and Society

  • Peter F. Drucker(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Harvard Business Review Press

    (Publisher)

  The world of Ford’s death, the world after World War II, was at least as much under the spell of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name as an earlier generation had been under that of Wilson. But Henry Ford in 1946 no longer symbolized an America that had successfully solved the basic social problems of an industrial world. He stood instead for the lack of a solution. And that surely accounted in large measure for the difference between 1919 and 1947 in the acceptance and the effectiveness of America’s moral and economic leadership.

  II

  Henry Ford took the conveyor belt and the assembly line from the meat-packing industry, where they had been in general use as early as 1880. The interchangeability of precision-made parts was an even older principle; it went back to the rifle plant which Eli Whitney built in Bridgeport for the War of 1812. The idea of breaking down a skilled job into the constituent elementary motions, so that it could be performed by unskilled men working in series, had been thoroughly explored—by Taylor among others—and had been widely used in American industry twenty years before Ford came on the scene, as, for example, by Singer Sewing Machine and National Cash Register. Yet we associate all these principles with Henry Ford, and rightly so. For each of them had been employed only as an auxiliary to the traditional manufacturing process. It was Ford who first combined them and evolved out of them consciously and deliberately a new concept of industrial production, a new technology. It is this new concept of mass production which in scarcely more than one generation gave us a new industrial civilization.

  To Ford the importance of this new principle lay in its impact on society as the means for producing an abundance of cheap goods with the minimum of human effort and toil. Mass production itself, however, he considered as something purely technical, as simply a new method of organizing mechanical forces. Ford disciples, heirs, and imitators, the engineers and production men who still run our big industries, are certainly as convinced as their master that mass production is a mechanical technique; many use it as if it were a mere gadget. And Charlie Chaplin took the same view when, in Modern Times,

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  Profitability with No Boundaries

  Optimizing TOC and Lean Six Sigma

  • Reza M. (Russ) Pirasteh, Robert E. Fox(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ASQ Quality Press

    (Publisher)

  Part I Leadership Summary 3 During the last century, three waves washed over the shores of developed and developing countries, creating both wealth and freedom. These waves were break- throughs in how companies managed their businesses, and all have deep roots in the automobile industry. Despite beginning in a single industry, these management systems eventually influenced many industries and countries. The first system was initiated early in the last century by Henry Ford at Ford Motor Company, the second was led by Alfred Sloan at General Motors, and the third resulted from the efforts of Taichi Ohno at Toyota Motor Company. Although these breakthroughs resulted in enormous increases in productivity, growth, and prosperity, they were not the result of improvements in technology, at least not how technology is commonly viewed. They were changes in how these three automobile companies managed their businesses. Today we stand on the verge of a fourth system of management, which promises similar benefits in productivity, growth, and prosperity. Henry Ford So what did Henry Ford do that was so earthshaking? We often view him as the inventor of the assembly line, a very efficient production process with negative overtones of subjecting people to mind-numbing repetitive tasks. Although there is truth in both viewpoints, they miss the magnitude of Ford’s accomplishment. Ford’s goal was extraordinarily ambitious, to say the least. He wanted to pro- duce a reliable, dependable automobile that the common man, including those who produced it, could afford. In the early 1900s, only the wealthy could afford an automobile. Such a purchase was far beyond the reach of the great majority, causing most people to live their entire lives within a few miles of their birthplaces. Ford’s management system changed all that. Between 1909 and 1927, he produced and sold 17 million Model Ts while driving the price down from $970 to $290, and that was without taking into account inflation.

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  Product Lifecycle and Production Management

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • College Publishing House

    (Publisher)

  ____________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ____________________ Chapter- 14 Theories of Production Fordism Fordism , named after Henry Ford, refers to various social theories about production and related socio-economic phenomena. It has varying but related meanings in different fields, as well as for Marxist and non-Marxist scholars. The essential meaning is that the worker must be paid higher wages in order to afford the products that the industrialist himself produces, causing an economy that runs full-circle. Introduction Henry Ford worked as an apprentice in different Michigan machine shops and in later years as a qualified engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. Here he received the first hand knowledge of how industries were being run. Although Henry Ford was not the inventor of the automobile, he developed unprecedented methods of production and marketing that made the automobile accessible to the American working class. Ford wanted to make cars that his workers could afford. He created the Ford Motor Company, which was one of a dozen small automobile manufacturers that emerged in the early 20th century. After three years of production, he introduced the Model T, which was simple and light, yet sturdy enough to drive on the country's primitive roads. Henry Ford's success and revolutionary techniques of production were termed Fordism. What is Fordism? Fordism is the eponymous manufacturing system designed to spew out standardized, low-cost goods and afford its workers decent enough wages to buy them. It has also been described as a model of economic expansion and technological progress based on mass production: the manufacture of standardized products in huge volumes using special purpose machinery and unskilled labour. Although Fordism was a method used to improve productivity in the automotive industry, this principle could be applied to any kind of manufacturing process.

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  Three Revolutions

  Steering Automated, Shared, and Electric Vehicles to a Better Future

  • Daniel Sperling(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Island Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7

  Remaking the Auto Industry

  Levi Tillemann

  The twentieth century was the age of automotive manufacturing. The twenty-first century will be the age of mobility. Automakers will remake themselves into companies that sell mobility services instead of vehicles—or at least they will try to.

  H

  ENRY FORD BUILT HIS FIRST VEHICLE, WHICH

  he called the quadricycle, over the course of about six months. Both his wife, Clara, and his friend James Bishop chipped in substantially. A decade and a half later, the Ford Motor Company built its ten millionth automobile. The comparison to Henry Ford’s quadricycle effort is stark: the Model T factory employed roughly five thousand times as many laborers and took about 1/2000th the amount of time to build a car.1 This staggering increase in scale and efficiency was facilitated by the introduction of the assembly line in 1908. Over the coming century, that simple innovation would expand the frontier of manufacturing efficiency to dizzying effect. The assembly line would progressively destroy and reconstitute the global economy in a giant wave of creative destruction—forever optimizing efficiency of production and churning out goods for a world of hungry consumers.2 Today, that line remains the beating heart of the global manufacturing economy.

  But now Ford’s mass production is about to be devoured by another technological revolution. To many, the name Elon Musk—and his corporate opus, Tesla Motors—epitomizes disruptive innovation in the twenty-first century. But a decidedly less heroic Silicon Valley CEO unleashed forces that will rival Henry Ford’s assembly line in terms of economic impact: Uber’s Travis Kalanick.

  As Uber’s CEO, Kalanick had a reputation as a ruthless competitor.3 Unlike Musk, he was not beloved by the media or general public—quite the contrary. Part of this had to do with his cutthroat business practices; the fact that he did not produce shiny objects likely didn’t help either. Kalanick was less interested in supercars or rockets than dollars and cents. But what he did create is a business model with a raw economic logic that makes SpaceX’s rocket boosters and Tesla’s electric supercars look puny by comparison—and for which Uber has been rewarded with an implied valuation that by 2017 exceeded that of Ford and GM, as well as Tesla.4

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  Icons of Invention

  The Makers of the Modern World from Gutenberg to Gates [2 volumes]

  • John W. Klooster(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Ford’s Prospects When Henry Ford was first developing his gasoline engines and autos in the 1890s, the automobile industry existed but was still relatively undeveloped. Technologies regarding engines, vehicles, and their components were still primitive but were well suited for creation, development, and manufacture. Had Ford and his activities relating to automobiles come along later, then he would have faced a substantially different environment and competitive situation, but had they come earlier, then he would have faced another and different set of problems having to do with the relatively undeveloped state of the needed relevant technologies and of the public mind. Study of Ford suggests that he was not a likely candidate for success, riches, and a place in history. As a group, his talents and training basically can mostly be regarded as limited, but by 1902, they were focused and well suited for his automobile endeavors, and he was motivated partly from prior failures to achieve. The world into which he stepped as an automobile designer, creator, developer, manager, and manufacturer was really very diverse, challenging, and competitive. Even though his early vehicle embodiments and components were not individually wholly pioneering or even substantial innovations com- pared with others, he evidently initially made an important and correct busi- ness judgment that he could design and produce new, improved, useful, durable, low-cost, and marketable vehicle embodiments that would sell read- ily. However, the times and the circumstances were not a likely combination in which one might expect that he and his innovations would flourish. He cer- tainly had very good competitors, but he succeeded against them all. Henry Ford Early Years Ford’s early life, including his training, seems to have been cumulative and to have fitted him well for working with automobiles. 336 Icons of Invention

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  The Contemporary CFO

  How Finance Leaders Can Drive Business Transformation, Performance and Growth in a Connected World

  • Michael Haupt(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  In the early days, Ford built cars the same way as everybody else – one at a time. By introducing automation, in combination with a re-engineered production process, Ford and his engineers introduced the assembly line. Applying Adam’s Smith principle of labour division, Ford placed workers at appointed stations and the chassis was hauled along between them using strong rope. 1 The chassis stopped at each station, where parts were fitted, until it was finally complete. Each department in the manufacturing process was broken down into sub-processes and assembly lines. As Ford was heard to remark, ‘everything in the plant moved’. 2 As a result, production speeds increased – sometimes they were up to four times faster. Producing cars more quickly than paint could dry, at less than half the cost, immensely influenced our economic thinking and management theory throughout the 20th century. In fact, most of the leading companies in successive decades became large and successful because they leveraged the same principles that Ford used to achieve efficient production and delivery of standardized products and services at scale. History not only reminds us of the business model that most of the large established companies were once designed for, and that remained the model during the first decades of the 21st century, but also raises three important points of caution as businesses enter an unpredictable future. First, in times of disruptive change, many leading established businesses can be slow to adapt. The introduction of electricity may have produced big winners, such as Ford, but there were plenty of losers too – primarily large and well-established businesses that failed to act quickly and decisively enough. In a short period, it drove the highest rate of business failure for incumbent companies in the 20th century outside of the Great Depression

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  Masters of Enterprise

  • H.W. Brands(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  To a considerable degree he suffered the fate that befalls revolutionaries who live beyond their time: to be overtaken by the forces they set in motion. More than any other individual, Ford created the automobile culture that has characterized American society for most of the twentieth century. Not everything about this car culture is admirable, as any gridlocked commuter can attest; but even so, the automobile has been one of the most profoundly democratizing influences in American history. Ford built cars for the masses, and the masses fell in love with the mobility and independence those cars provided. If they—or, in most cases, their children—moved on to other cars, they were simply exercising an aspect of the independence he had done so much to foster.

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  Simplify

  How the Best Businesses in the World Succeed

  • Richard Koch, Greg Lockwood(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Entrepreneur Press

    (Publisher)

  “What I am trying to emphasize is that the ordinary way of doing business is not the best way. I am coming to the point of my entire departure from the ordinary methods. From this point dates the extraordinary success of the company.

  We had been fairly following the custom of the trade. Our automobile was less complex than any other. We had no outside money in the concern. But aside from these two points we did not differ materially from the other automobile companies.”1

  When Ford had his light-bulb moment, several hundred rival entrepreneurs were making cars. They were much the same in background and activity: all engineers; nearly all product designers; all auto enthusiasts, entering cars in motor races and taking a keen interest in who won; and all making no more than a few cars a day. They sold them to the same type of customer, too — the only market at that time for cars — rich and leisured gentlemen, usually motor “nuts,” skilled in driving and maintaining their beautiful beasts. Ford, though not the market leader, was one of the biggest manufacturers, making around five vehicles a day.

  But however conventional he appeared in 1908, there was always something odd about Henry Ford and his opinions. “From the day the first motor car appeared on the streets,” he wrote, “it had to me appeared to be a necessity.”2 This was considered an eccentric view at a time when the cost of a car was far more than the annual wages of a skilled worker. Yet Ford was a stubborn man. Though his whole industry was in the business of providing “pleasure cars” for the rich, Ford conceived a vision of something completely different. To their horror, he told his salespeople:

  “I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary would be unable to own one — and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”3

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