Word: forde
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...sense Henry Ford became a prisoner of his own success. He turned on some of his best and brightest when they launched design changes or plans he had not approved. On one level you have to admire his paternalism. He was so worried that his workers would go crazy with their five bucks a day that he set up a "Sociological Department" to make sure that they didn't blow the money on booze and vice. He banned smoking because he thought, correctly as it turned out, that tobacco was unhealthy. "I want the whole organization dominated by a just...
Naturally, Ford, and only Ford, determined that policy. He was violently opposed to labor organizers, whom he saw as "the worst thing that ever struck the earth," and entirely unnecessary--who, after all, knew more about taking care of his people than he? Only when he was faced with a general strike in 1941 did he finally agree to let the United Auto Workers organize a plant...
...then Alfred P. Sloan had combined various car companies into a powerful General Motors, with a variety of models and prices to suit all tastes. He had also made labor peace. That left Ford in the dust, its management in turmoil. And if World War II hadn't turned the company's manufacturing prowess to the business of making B-24 bombers and jeeps, it is entirely possible that the 1932 V-8 engine might have been Ford's last innovation...
...prewar years there was no intelligent management at Ford. When I arrived at the end of the war, the company was a monolithic dictatorship. Its balance sheet was still being kept on the back of an envelope, and the guys in purchasing had to weigh the invoices to count them. College kids, managers, anyone with book learning was viewed with some kind of suspicion. Ford had done so many screwy things--from terrorizing his own lieutenants to canonizing Adolf Hitler--that the company's image was as low as it could...
...Henry Ford II who rescued the legacy. He played down his grandfather's antics, and he made amends with the Jewish business community that Henry Ford had alienated so much with the racist attacks that are now a matter of historical record. Henry II encouraged the "whiz kids" like Robert McNamara and Arjay Miller to modernize management, which put the company back on track. Ford was the first company to get a car out after the war, and it was the only company that had a real base overseas. In fact, one of the reasons that Ford is so competitive...