Great Personality Henry Ford

“I will build a car for the great multitude….; so low in price that no man will be unable to own one.”
At a Glance:
1863 Born on July 30 in Greenfield Tounship, Michigan.
1879 Left family farm (at the age of 16) and walked eight miles to get his first job in a Detroit Machine shop.
1888 Married Clara Bryant of Greenfield Tounship and moved to 80-acre farm in what is Dearborn today.
1893 Edsel Bryant Ford, only child of Henry Ford and Clara Ford, born.
1896 Completed his automobile, the Quadricycle, and drove it through the streets of Detroit.
1899 Became Chief Engineer and partner in the newly formed company, which produced only a few cars.
1902 Ford resigned over dispute with bankers and the company became the Cadillac Motor Car Co.
1903 After two unsuccessful attempts to establish a company to manufacture automobiles, the Ford Motor Company was officially incorporated. First Model A appeared on the market in Detroit.
1908 Realized his dream of producing an automobile that was reasonably priced, reliable, and efficient with the introduction of Model T. This vehicle initiated a new era inpersonal transportation. It was easy to operate, maintain, and handle it on rough roads.
1910 To meet the growing demand for the Model T, Ford’s company opened a large factory at Highland Park, Michigan. Henry combined precision manufacture. Standardized, interchangeable parts, a division of labour etc.
1912 Ford invented the dealer franchise system to sell and service cars. The dealer network rose to 7000 across the country. He campaigned for better roads, which eventually led to an interstate-highway system.
1913 Ford introduced the world’s first continuous moving assembly line at Highland Park and thus pioneered the mass production. This system revolutionized automobile production by significantly reducing assembly time per vehicle, thus lowering costs. It could churn out a car every 93 minutes.
1914 Ford stunned the world with his greatest contribution ever, i.e., the $ 5 and eight hour day minimum wage in the auto industry then was $ 2-3 for a nine hour shift. The wall street journal called his plan, “an economic crime” and critics everywhere heaped scorn on him.
1921 Ford Motor Company dominated auto production with 55 per cent of the industry’s total production.
1926 Henry Ford focused on air transportation and developed the Tri-Motor airplane.
1927 Production ceased for the model T. By this time, more that 15 million cars had been sold, which was around half the World’s output.
1930 Ford was one of the nation’s foremost opponents of labour unions and was the last automobile manufacturer to unionize his work force.
In Later 1930s
Mobilized his factories for the war effort and produced bombers, Jeeps and tanks for Wrold War-II.
1932 Made first V-8 engine Ford car
1947 Henry Ford died at the age of 83, at Fair Lane mansion, his Dearborn Home.
Remember
It is but for Henry Ford’s drive to create a mass market for cars, America wouldn’t have middle class today. His lasting contribution to the world of management and engineering was his ‘Invention’ of the Assembly line. More than a engineering invention, it symbolized the manager’s eternal quest for higher productivity and better resource utilization.
Thoughts of Henry Ford
1. There isn’t a person anywhere that isn’t capable of doing more than he thinks he can.
2. I am looking for a lot of men with infinite capacity for not knowing what can no be done.
3. Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
4. Obstacles are those frightful thing you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
5. You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to be.
6. Thinking is the hardest work, which is the probable reason why so few engage in it.
Some Facts About Henry Ford
· Henry Ford was a genius, though an eccentric. Simplicity was one of his virtues, as he was no prince in his social attitudes and his politics.
· He was from modest. Agrarian Michigan roots. In 1905, his backers at the Ford Motor Company were insisting that the best way to maximize profits was to build a car for the rich. But, instead of listening to his backers, he made a smart move in a crusade that would make him the father of 20th century American industry. When the block Model T rolled out in 1908, it was hailed as America’s Everyman car-elegant in its simplicity and a dream machine not just for engineers but for marketing men as well. This model car made his company the largest automobile manufacturer in the world.
· After the model T’s enormous success, the two visionaries from rural Michigan became his friends and business partners. Ford asked Thomas Alva Edison to develop an electric storage battery for the car and funded the effort with $ 1.5 million. Despite all his other great inventions, Edison never perfected the storage battery. Yet ford immortalized his mentor’s inventive genius by building the Edison Institute in Dearborn.
· He made and drove race cars early in his career to demonstrate that his engineering designs had produced reliable vehicles.
· Ford was an unsuccessful candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1918.
· He owned a controversial newspaper, The Dearborn Independent that published anti-Jewish articles which tarnished his image.
· He promoted the early use of aviation technology.
· He sought way to use agricultural products in Industrial production. Including soybean-based plastic automobile components.
· Ford-s great strength was the manufacturing process-not invention. Long before he started a car company, he was known for picking up loose scraps of metal and wire and turning them into machines. The Model T showed the world just how innovative Ford was at combining technology and markets.
· His company began construction of the world’s largest industrial complex along the banks of the Rough River in Dearborn, Michigan, during the late 1910s and early 1920s. the massive Rouge Plant included all the basic elements needed for automobile production: a steel mill, glass factory and automobile assembly line. All steps in the manufacturing process from refining raw-materials to final assembly of the automobile took place at this plan, thus characterizing Henry Ford’s idea of mass production.
· By the late 1920s, Ford’s company had become so vertically intergrated that it was completely self-sufficient. Ford controlled rubber plantations in Brazil, a fleet of ships, a railroad, 16 coal mines and thousands of acres of timberland and iron-ore mines in Michigan and Minnesota. All this was combined at the gigantic River Rouge Plant, Where more than 1,00,000 men more worked.
· Henry Ford stumbled. It was because he wanted to do everything his own way. This weakness brought him a set-back in the later 1920s. the problem was that for too long he worked on only one model T. Although people told him to diversify, he had developed tunnel vision, He started saying “to hell with the customer”, who can have any color as long as it’s black. He didn’t bring out a new design until the Model A in 1927, and by then General Motor’s was gaining In a sense Ford became a prisoner of his own success.
Secondly, he was running the enterprise without managers. His unparalleled success fell won to near collapse in fifteen short years. It is said that by the time World War-II started, Ford’s market share had fallen to 20 per cent and had not made any profits in these fifteen years.
The great set black came to Henry Ford, when his only son, Fedsel Ford, suddenly died during the second world war. At that time the reality was such that the survival of his company seemed improbable.
The Ford Motor Company might have collapsed even in the post-war period had Henry Ford’s concept of managing business without managers not been changed radically by his grandson and successor, Henry Ford III (son of Edsel Bryant Ford). The story of the revival of the Ford Motor Company begins from 1944, which is one of the epics of American business.