Henry Ford - Against the Grain

In his study "The Mentality of Acquisition," Klaus Hansen (1992)1 tells the following story: A young man tries to implement an idea. For 18 years, unsuccessfully. He has the vision that by means of gasoline explosions (shortly before the first engines had been developed) a horse-drawn carriage could be moved in a controlled manner by means of appropriate linkage and technology. A bold and daring vision that he shares with few other people of his time. The father thinks the son is crazy and misguided. When the vehicle is to set off for the first time, he refuses to get on because he does not want to risk his life. The son strings together failure after failure. Finally, a car he built wins a car race, and only because the car, more durable than those of the competitors, actually makes it to the finish line. The man's name is Henry Ford.

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"There are more people who surrender than those who fail."

Henry Ford 

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The revolution of the assembly line

Ford's story is instructive because he is regarded as the very model of the great capitalist, behind whom the fractiousness of the early days, the development of ideas, the perseverance and obsession of the dissident disappear. 

Another facet also does not fit into the usual grid. While the public celebrates or condemns Ford as the inventor of the assembly line, depending on their point of view, Hansen (1992, p. 112 ff)¹ asks whether he is the inventor at all. The decisive innovation, the flowing belt, had been that the workpiece was transported past the workers by machine. This idea, however, according to Hansen, came from the slaughterhouses of Chicago, where half the cattle were processed, suspended from a slowly moving belt. The credit for the invention probably belongs to the French manager of the slaughterhouse, Georges Duhamel. What is interesting about this for our point of view is that the entrepreneur Ford would not be the inventor, but the innovator. He would have transferred the idea and applied it in a new way that made economic history.

Quality instead of profit maximization

Acting as a capitalist, according to Hansen (1992, p. 114 ff.)¹, his entrepreneurial against-the-grain thinking is usually forgotten. If the goal of the company is unilaterally to generate profit, Ford says, then attention is paid only to the salability of the product and not to its usefulness or quality. The weaknesses of a product are then compensated for by advertising, with the customer having to bear the resulting additional costs. The damage to the general public would be twofold: on the one hand, bad products would be sold, and on the other hand, people would pay too high prices for good as well as bad ones.

If Ford had had its way, the Model T would still be in production today, with all the technical improvements possible, but without any compromises on fashionable attributes - a horror scenario for any product manager.  From him, whom his directors called "the world's worst salesman," development departments might learn to think back to simple and functional products and to free themselves from the dictates of the marketing experts who set the tone today.

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"Quality means doing the right thing,
when no one is looking."

Henry Ford 

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One could imagine a Henry Ford today as an obsessive of the solar car, as the developer of a radically cheaper ecological automobile, but also as an entrepreneur of a new industrial asceticism, the restriction to product quality and durability.

The text is an excerpt from the essay: "Casting the net wider - For a new culture of entrepreneurial action" by Günter Faltin.

Henry Ford was an American industrialist, business magnate, founder of the Ford Motor Company and main developer of the assembly line technology of mass production. By creating the first automobile that even the American middle class could afford, he transformed the automobile from an expensive luxury into an affordable mode of transportation that left a lasting mark on the landscape of the 20th century. His introduction of the Model T Ford revolutionized transportation and American industry.

¹Hansen, Klaus P. (1992): The Mentality of Acquisition. Philosophies of success of American entrepreneurs. Frankfurt am Main.