Ford Motor Quotes

We went to the New York World's Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

When Henry Ford decided to produce his famous V-8 motor, he chose to build an engine with the entire eight cylinders cast in one block, and instructed his engineers to produce a design for the engine. The design was placed on paper, but the engineers agreed, to a man, that it was simply impossible to cast an eight-cylinder engine-block in one piece. Ford replied,''Produce it anyway.

Take care of your car in the garage, and the car will take care of you on the road.

Henry Ford failed in business several times and was flat broke five times before he founded the Ford Motor Company.

I am emotional about engines, if you hurt my car, you hurt my heart.

In 2012, Google, for example, generated a profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting for inflation.

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara. “Well, Lyndon,” Mister Sam answered, “you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.” It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between the abstract quickness and verbal fluency which the team exuded, and the true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experience. Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

My grandfather's short employ at the Ford Motor Company marked the only time any Stephanides has ever worked in the automotive industry. Instead of cars, we could become manufacturers of hamburger platters and Greek salads, industrialists of spanakopita and grilled cheese sandwiches, technocrats of rice pudding and banana cream pie. Our assembly line was the grill; our heavy machinery, the soda fountain.

Contrast societies with such restricted sources of decision-making ability with a society in which a farm boy who walked eight miles to Detroit to look for a job could end up creating the Ford Motor Company and changing the face of America with mass-produced automobiles—or a society in which a couple of young bicycle mechanics could invent the airplane and change the whole world. Neither a lack of pedigree, nor a lack of academic degrees, nor even a lack of money could stop ideas that worked, for investment money is always looking for a winner to back and cash in on.

You have to expect the unexpected, and you have to deal with it." he said. "Whining is not a plan. Wallowing is not a plan. We have a plan, and if we need to adjust it, we will".

Asking someone else to drive your sports car is like asking someone else to kiss your girlfriend.

Business men go down with their businesses because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about - men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with last year's ideas. - Henry Ford

Among all the machines, motorcar is my favorite machine.

It is failure that is easy. Success is always hard

company’s fabled Model T with a new Model A in 1927 dealt Ford Motor Company a setback

We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need? -Lee Iacocca, former chairman, Ford Motor Company

I will build a 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 will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces. - Henry Ford

Henry Ford thought debt was a lazy man’s method to purchase items, and his philosophy was so ingrained in Ford Motor Company that Ford didn’t offer financing until ten years after General Motors did. Now, of course, Ford Motor Credit is one of the most profitable of Ford Motor’s operations. The old school saw the folly of debt; the new school saw the opportunity to take advantage of the consumer with debt.

The Ford Motor Company did not offer financing to its buyers until the 1920s. Its founder believed that it was morally irresponsible to sell cars on credit to people whose dreams did not meet their budgets.

The Ford Motor Company CEO taunts Reuther by asking, “Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?” Reuther comes right back at Ford, asking, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” While

The Hidden Benefits of Competition The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time. —HENRY FORD, FOUNDER OF THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY AND ASSEMBLY-LINE PIONEER

There’s a widespread conviction, spoken and unspoken, that the road to riches is trimmed in Ivy and the reins of power held by those who’ve donned Harvard’s crimson, Yale’s blue and Princeton’s orange, not just on their chests but in their souls. No one told that to the Fortune 500. They’re the American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revised yearly. As I write this paragraph in the summer of 2014, the top ten are, in order, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy. And here’s the list, in the same order, of schools where their chief executives got their undergraduate degrees: the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Just one Ivy League school shows up.

profit of nearly $14 billion while employing fewer than 38,000 people.9 Contrast that with the automotive industry. At peak employment in 1979, General Motors alone had nearly 840,000 workers but earned only about $11 billion—20 percent less than what Google raked in. And, yes, that’s after adjusting

The European immigrants who emerged from the Ford Motor Company melting pot came to the United States because they hoped to assimilate into mainstream American society. The Hmong came to the United States for the same reason they had left China in the nineteenth century: because they were trying to resist assimilation.

FORD SAID, "I'LL BELT THE EARTH WITH DEPENDABLE MOTOR CARS," AND HE DID! His decision to trust his own judgment has already piled up a fortune far greater than the next five generations of his descendents can squander. For the benefit of those seeking vast riches, let it be remembered that practically the sole difference between Henry Ford and a majority of the more than one hundred thousand men who work for him, is this--FORD HAS A MIND AND CONTROLS IT, THE OTHERS HAVE MINDS WHICH THEY DO NOT TRY TO CONTROL.

Henry Ford’s antisemitism was rank, and it was unchecked. He spewed it freely in private tirades among friends, family, close business cohorts, newspaper reporters, or pretty much anybody within earshot. He lectured his sometimes-weary auditors in the Ford Motor Company offices, in private chats, in interviews, at dinners, even on camping trips. Ford “attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists,” a close friend wrote in his diary after witnessing a late-night, round-the-campfire diatribe. Ford whined about “New York Jews” and railed about “Wall Street Kikes.” He even ordered his engineers to forgo the use of any brass in his Model T automobile, calling it “Jew metal.

General Motors, ITT, and Ford come most readily to mind as having plants protected by Hitler,

I am so obsessed with the cars that sometimes I feel like my heart is not a muscle, it's an engine.

We must be,” the President said, “the great arsenal of democracy.

Running a business is a design job. You need a point of view about the future, a really good plan to deliver that future, and then relentless implementation.

You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do. —HENRY FORD

the first businesses in the United States to implement Owen’s 8-hour day was the Ford Motor Company. In 1914, it not only cut the standard workday to eight hours, but it also doubled its workers’ pay in the process. To the shock of many at the time, this resulted in a significant increase in productivity, and Ford’s profit margins doubled within two years of implementation.

The two little girls and I crossed the Delaware River where George Washington had crossed it, the next morning. We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford more than doubled the minimum wage for many of his employees by introducing a $5 a day minimum pay scale for employees of the Ford Motor Company. On that same day, Ford began offering profit sharing to his employees and reduced shifts from nine hours to eight. Ford’s treasurer at the time, James Couzens, explained these bold leadership moves by saying, “It is our belief that social justice begins at home. We want those who have helped us to produce this

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became

For his “distinguished service to the Reich,” Henry Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle—the highest medal that Nazi Germany could award to a foreigner—in July of 1938. James Mooney, a senior executive for General Motors, received his medal a month later.

In 2014, a senior executive from the Ford Motor Company told an audience at the Consumer Electronics Show, “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing.” This came as a shock and surprise, since no one knew Ford had its car owners under constant surveillance. The company quickly retracted the remarks, but the comments left a lot of wiggle room for Ford to collect data on its car owners. We know from a Government Accountability Office report that both automobile companies and navigational aid companies collect a lot of location data from their users.

No wonder the men hate you,” she said. “They don’t!” he replied. “And don’t fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don’t understand, and never could. Don’t thrust your illusions on other people. The masses were always the same, and will always be the same. Nero’s slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor-car workmen. I mean Nero’s mine slaves and his field slaves. It is the masses: they are the unchangeable. An individual may emerge from the masses. But the emergence doesn’t alter the mass. The masses are unalterable. It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.

Albert Einstein, considered the most influential person of the 20th century, was four years old before he could speak and seven before he could read. His parents thought he was retarded. He spoke haltingly until age nine. He was advised by a teacher to drop out of grade school: “You’ll never amount to anything, Einstein.” Isaac Newton, the scientist who invented modern-day physics, did poorly in math. Patricia Polacco, a prolific children’s author and illustrator, didn’t learn to read until she was 14. Henry Ford, who developed the famous Model-T car and started Ford Motor Company, barely made it through high school. Lucille Ball, famous comedian and star of I Love Lucy, was once dismissed from drama school for being too quiet and shy. Pablo Picasso, one of the great artists of all time, was pulled out of school at age 10 because he was doing so poorly. A tutor hired by Pablo’s father gave up on Pablo. Ludwig van Beethoven was one of the world’s great composers. His music teacher once said of him, “As a composer, he is hopeless.” Wernher von Braun, the world-renowned mathematician, flunked ninth-grade algebra. Agatha Christie, the world’s best-known mystery writer and all-time bestselling author other than William Shakespeare of any genre, struggled to learn to read because of dyslexia. Winston Churchill, famous English prime minister, failed the sixth grade.

Most Web activities do not generate jobs and revenue at the rate of past technological breakthroughs. When Ford and General Motors were growing in the early part of the twentieth century, they created millions of jobs and helped build Detroit into a top-tier U.S. city. Today, Facebook creates a lot of voyeuristic pleasure, but the company doesn’t employ many people and hasn’t done much for Palo Alto; a lot of the “work” is performed more or less automatically by the software and the servers. You could say that the real work is done by its users, in their spare time and as a form of leisure. Web 2.0 is not filling government coffers or supporting many families, even though it’s been great for users, programmers, and some information technology specialists. Everyone on the Web has heard of Twitter, but as of Fall 2010, only about three hundred people work there.

Having seen several hundred lease agreements entered into by people I have counseled, my financial calculator confirms that the average interest rate is 14 percent. Shouldn’t you lease or rent things that go down in value? Not necessarily, and the math doesn’t work on a car, for sure. Follow me through this example: If you rent (lease) a car with a value of $22,000 for three years, and when you turn it in at the end of that three-year lease the car is worth $10,000, someone has to cover the $12,000 loss. You’re not stupid, so you know that General Motors, Ford, or any of the other auto giants aren’t going to put together a plan to lose money. Your fleece/lease payment is designed to cover the loss in value ($12,000 spread over 36 months is equal to $333 per month), plus provide profit (the interest you pay). Where did you get a deal in that? You didn’t! On top of that, there is the charge of 10 to 17 cents per mile for going over the allotted miles and the penalties everyone turning in a lease has experienced for “excessive wear and tear,” which takes into account every little nick, dent, carpet tear, smudge, or smell. You end up writing a large check just to walk away after renting your car. The whole idea of the back-end penalties is twofold: to get you to fleece/lease another one so you can painlessly roll the gotchas into the new lease, and to make sure the car company makes money.

In June 1940, immediately after France surrendered to the invading Nazis, Rieber and Westrick took part in a celebratory dinner in a private room at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, where executives of Ford, General Motors, Eastman Kodak, and other companies talked about the prospects for American cooperation with the Nazi regime that seemed certain to dominate Europe for the foreseeable future. Germany would be a good credit risk for American loans, Westrick said, and there should definitely be no more of this nonsense of selling US arms to the British.

Just prior to that, Henry Ford had instigated operations that used the principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor to promote efficiency in his automobile factories—as did Lenin to advance his super-population in 1920. As extraordinary as it might sound, the name Henry Ford became well known throughout Russian villages in the 1920s—better known, in fact, than the names of many party leaders. Lenin had imported Ford Motor Company tractors in large numbers after the revolution. Peasants affectionately called these tractors “Fordzonishkas” (they also were said to have named their children after Ford in the early years of the Soviet era!), and the terms fordizatsiya and teilorizatsiya (Fordization, Taylorization) were used in Soviet universities in the 1920s. 13 And it was exactly this effect, the mechanizing of Russia, thanks to American industrial thought, that Zamyatin so fiercely satirized in his novel. Indeed, in 1922, Max Eastman, defender of the revolution in Russia, said, “I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world of capitalism and Communism and all were rushing toward some enormous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life.”14

Ford began building his first automobile after he moved to Detroit, in a workshop he set up in a brick shed behind his Detroit duplex. The quadricycle, as he called it, was more a four-wheeled, motorized bicycle than an automobile. With a two-cylinder, four-cycle, four-horsepower gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine installed under the bench seat, a tiller for steering, and no brakes, it weighed just five hundred pounds.1 It took him three years to design and build, by hand. (“Ford was working in a world that contained no automobile parts,” quips one of his biographers.2) He rolled the quadricycle out of the workshop—after enlarging the narrow brick doorway with a sledgehammer—at two o’clock on a rainy June morning in 1896.

On May 31, 1921, the Ford Motor Company turned out Car No. 5,000,000. It is out in my museum along with the gasoline buggy that I began work on thirty years before and which first ran satisfactorily along in the spring of 1893. I was running it when the bobolinks came to Dearborn and they always come on April 2nd. There is all the difference in the world in the appearance of the two vehicles and almost as much difference in construction and materials, but in fundamentals the two are curiously alike—except that the old buggy has on it a few wrinkles that we have not yet quite adopted in our modern car. For that first car or buggy, even though it had but two cylinders, would make twenty miles an hour and run sixty miles on the three gallons of gas the little tank held and is as good to-day as the day it was built. The development in methods of manufacture and in materials has been greater than the development in basic design. The whole design has been refined; the present Ford car, which is the "Model T," has four cylinders and a self starter—it is in every way a more convenient and an easier riding car. It is simpler than the first car. But almost every point in it may be found also in the first car. The changes have been brought about through experience in the making and not through any change in the basic principle—which I take to be an important fact demonstrating that, given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea.

If buyers either are partially integrated or pose a credible threat of backward integration, they are in a position to demand bargaining concessions.9 The major automobile producers, General Motors and Ford, are well known for using the threat of self-manufacture as a bargaining lever. They engage in the practice of tapered integration, that is, producing some of their needs for a given component in-house and purchasing the rest from outside suppliers. Not only is their threat of further integration particularly credible, but also partial manufacture in-house gives them a detailed knowledge of costs which is a great aid in negotiation. Buyer power can be partially neutralized when firms in the industry offer a threat of forward integration into the buyers’ industry.

A number of Ford engineers arrived at Derby, and spent some months examining and familiarizing themselves with the drawings and manufacturing methods. One day their Chief Engineer appeared in Lovesey’s office, which I was then sharing, and said, ‘You know, we can’t make the Merlin to these drawings’. I replied loftily, ‘I suppose that is because the drawing tolerances are too difficult for you, and you can’t achieve the accuracy’. ‘On the contrary’, he replied, ‘the tolerances are far too wide for us. We make motor cars far more accurately than this. Every part on our car engines has to be interchangeable with the same part on any other engine, and hence all parts have to be made with extreme accuracy, far closer than you use. That is the only way we can achieve mass production’.

the Big Three own, which include America’s major airlines (American, Delta, United Continental), much of Wall Street (JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup) and car makers such as Ford and General Motors. Together, the Big Three are the largest single shareholder in almost 90 per cent of firms listed in the New York Stock Exchange, including Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola. As for the dollar value of the Big Three’s shares, it has too many zeros to mean much. At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion and State Street $4 trillion. To make sense of these numbers: they are almost exactly the same as the US national income; or the sum of the national incomes of China and Japan; or the sum of the total income of the eurozone, the UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.

Suppose someone—say Mr. Henry Ford—finds out a way of making motor-cars so cheaply that no one else can compete, with the result that all the other firms engaged in making cars go bankrupt. In order to arrive at the cost to the community of one of the new cheap cars, one must add, to what Mr. Ford would have to pay, the proper proportion of all the now useless plant belonging to other firms, and of the cost of rearing and educating those workers and managers previously employed by other firms but now out of work. (Some will obtain employment with Mr. Ford, but probably not all, since the new process is cheaper, and therefore requires less labour.) There may well also be other expenses to the community —labour disputes, strikes, riots, extra police, trials and imprisonments. When all these items are taken into account, it may well be found that the cost of the new cars to the community is, at first, considerably greater than that of the old ones. Now it is the cost to the community which determines what is socially advantageous, while it is the cost to the individual manufacturer which determines, in our system, what takes place.

Ford and General Motors executives made a big deal of the occasion by driving to Washington in their hybrid vehicles. Mulally of Ford came in an Escape SUV hybrid. Wagoner of General Motors was chauffeured in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Poor Bob Nardelli of Chrysler. The pickings were slim. Chrysler, known more for the styling of it's bodies than for its technological savvy, sent Nardelli to Washington in an Aspen Hybrid SUV, about the only "green" thing Chrysler had to offer. Problem is, it was a terrible vehicle and unreliable. Despite being partially powered by a battery, the Aspen ran on a V-8 Hemi and got less than twenty miles to the gallon. The charging system was flawed and difficult to service. His driver was Mike Carlisle, the homicide detective who had retired from the Detroit Police Department just a month earlier. The media was invited to snap bon voyage photographs in Detroit, which they dutifully filed. What they did not see -and what Carlisle later told me- was that there were two engineers tailing Nardelli at a discreet three-mile buffer, carrying laptops and a trunk full of tolls in case the Aspen broke down. Even Chrysler didn't trust their products.

Perhaps the most remarkable elder-care innovation developed in Japan so far is the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL)—a powered exoskeleton suit straight out of science fiction. Developed by Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba, the HAL suit is the result of twenty years of research and development. Sensors in the suit are able to detect and interpret signals from the brain. When the person wearing the battery-powered suit thinks about standing up or walking, powerful motors instantly spring into action, providing mechanical assistance. A version is also available for the upper body and could assist caretakers in lifting the elderly. Wheelchair-bound seniors have been able to stand up and walk with the help of HAL. Sankai’s company, Cyberdyne, has also designed a more robust version of the exoskeleton for use by workers cleaning up the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in the wake of the 2011 disaster. The company says the suit will almost completely offset the burden of over 130 pounds of tungsten radiation shielding worn by workers.* HAL is the first elder-care robotic device to be certified by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. The suits lease for just under $2,000 per year and are already in use at over three hundred Japanese hospitals and nursing homes.21

Sheriff Tubman padded down his driveway in a blue bathrobe cinched tight and fat moccasin slippers. His hair was mussed and his ankles were skinny and mottled and so white they almost looked blue in the dawn. As he bent over to retrieve his newspaper he heard the sound of the motor and looked up, puzzled. Cassie watched him closely as he registered who was in the county Ford. As she pulled up in front of him and stopped, he rose to full height and squinted at her through the windshield, holding the newspaper down at his side. His studied arrogance hadn’t kicked in yet, which is what she counted on. She shoved the big Ford into park and climbed out. The front bumper of the vehicle was just a few feet away from him. She got out and shut the door but kept the engine running. The purr of the motor was the only sound. “Nice place,” she said, walking up alongside the vehicle. She took a side step at the front and leaned back against the grille and crossed her arms under her breasts. It was a posture she’d seen Cody Hoyt assume many times; passive but judgmental at the same time. She’d been surprised how many times perps started yapping and volunteering information they never would otherwise because they assumed Cody had the goods on them.

Google is to surveillance capitalism what the Ford Motor Company and General Motors were to mass-production–based managerial capitalism.

Starting with his modest amount of capital, Ford began his work on the Ford Motor Company’s first car, the Model A, starting in 1903. And from the start, contradictions abounded. Ford didn’t believe that the customer was always right. Indeed, he attributed the difficulties of his early competitors to their slavish need to listen to customers. To Ford this was a trap. The customers willing to pay the absolute most for a car were ones who wanted customization. But an automaker willing to customize, to cater to individual requests, lost the opportunity to scale his operation, which rested on repeating the same thing over and over again. To reduce the cost of production, a manufacturer needed to standardize components and processes. Customization, in Ford’s words, led to “the habit of grabbing at the nearest dollar as though it were the only dollar in the world.” Customers needed to be led, not followed.

year-old man in a matter of hours.”13 Moored alongside the West Virginia inboard to Ford Island, the Tennessee had taken two bomb hits from the high-altitude bombers of the first wave. Far more seriously, the Tennessee had been inundated by a wall of blazing oil and debris blowing onto its stern from the burning Arizona. The heat was intense, and fires started on the stern and port quarter of the ship. There were no thoughts about abandoning ship, but with his crew engaged in major firefighting efforts, the Tennessee’s captain tried to move his ship forward to escape the inferno astern. He signaled for all engines ahead five knots, but the Tennessee didn’t budge. The battleship was wedged too tightly against the quays by the stricken West Virginia. Nonetheless, its engines were kept turning throughout the day and long into the night so that the propeller wash would keep the burning oil from the Arizona away from its stern as well as the West Virginia. As it was, one of the Tennessee’s motor launches caught fire from the burning oil and sank as it tried to rescue survivors.

At the age of five, she was forced to flee an area of the world that is now Pakistan. It was during the time of the bloody Indian subcontinent partition. Along with her family, my mother joined one of the largest human migrations in history. After arriving in India, she lived as a refugee for the next several years, struggling to survive. People in those refugee camps didn’t have the luxury of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Yet her mother (my grandmother), Gopibai Hingorani, a woman who had completed only the fourth grade, told her she was going to make sure her daughter received something that no one could ever take away from her: an education. It still gives me shivers to imagine a young girl trapped in a camp being told she would one day become someone who mattered. By keeping her promise, my grandmother initially gave my mother her sense of purpose. My mom completed engineering college in India and made history as the first female engineer there. It was just the beginning of her life in a male-dominated space. After reading a biography of Henry Ford, she dreamed of working for the company that he’d built. Again, my grandparents came through. They took their savings of a lifetime to send my mom to the United States in 1965. At age twenty-four, she became the first woman hired as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. My parents are now retired in Florida, but they stay active, playing a lot of bridge, singing karaoke, and traveling. My mother spends a lot of time with her five granddaughters, teaching them the value of a life lived with purpose.

had a friend at that time. We’ll call him Chris. He was a smart guy. He read a lot. He liked science fiction of the kind I was attracted to (Bradbury, Heinlein, Clarke). He was inventive. He was interested in electronic kits and gears and motors. He was a natural engineer. All this was overshadowed, however, by something that had gone wrong in his family. I don’t know what it was. His sisters were smart and his father was soft-spoken and his mother was kind. The girls seemed OK. But Chris had been left unattended to in some important way. Despite his intelligence and curiosity he was angry, resentful and without hope. All this manifested itself in material form in the shape of his 1972 blue Ford pickup truck. That notorious vehicle had at least one dent in every quarter panel of its damaged external body. Worse, it had an equivalent number of dents inside. Those were produced by the impact of the body parts of friends against the internal surfaces during the continual accidents that resulted in the outer dents. Chris’s truck was the exoskeleton of a nihilist.

Since the time of Edison, American business innovation and entrepreneurship have given the United States a technological edge over geopolitical rivals and ensured U.S. military supremacy. Ford’s mass-produced trucks and cars proved critical in many battles of World War I in overcoming Germany’s advantageous access to European railroad transport. Over the course of the war, the United States manufactured more than 70 percent of all allied war material, with Ford Motor Company alone contributing more than the entire Italian national war effort. By the 1940s, the U.S. domestic oil industry, dominated by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, constituted two-thirds of world oil production and was a crucial factor in closing Britain’s fuel deficit compared to Germany and Japan.

Before he could start writing Kilby’s application, though, Mosher had to resolve a fundamental tactical question. Anyone who applies for a patent has to decide whether he needs it for offensive or for defensive purposes—whether, to use lawyers’ favorite metaphor, he wants his patent to be a sword or a shield. The decision usually turns on the novelty of the invention. If somebody has a genuinely revolutionary idea, a breakthrough that his competitors are almost sure to copy, his lawyers will write a patent application they can use as a sword; they will describe the invention in such broad and encompassing terms that they can take it into court for an injunction against any competitor who tries to sell a product that is even remotely related. In contrast, an inventor whose idea is basically an extension of or an improvement on an earlier idea needs a patent application that will work as a shield—a defense against legal action by the sword wielders. Such a defensive patent is usually written in much narrower terms, emphasizing a specific improvement or a particular application of the idea that is not covered clearly in earlier patents. Probably the most famous sword in the history of the patent system was the sweeping application filed on February 14, 1876, by a teacher and part-time inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. That first telephone patent (No. 174,465) was so broad and inclusive that it became the cornerstone—after Bell and his partners had fought some 600 lawsuits against scores of competitors—of the largest corporate family in the world. In the nature of things, though, few inventions are so completely new that they don’t build on something from the past. The majority of patent applications, therefore, are written as shields—as improvements on some earlier invention. Some of the most important patents in American history fall into this category, including No. 586,193, “New and Useful Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses,” granted to Guglielmo Marconi in 1898; No. 621,195, “Improvements in and Relating to Navigable Balloons,” granted to Ferdinand Zeppelin in 1899; No. 686,046, “New and Useful Improvements in Motor Carriages,” granted to Henry Ford in 1901; and No. 821,393, “New and Useful Improvements in Flying Machines,” granted to Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1906.

In 1903, the president of a leading bank had certainly leaned out when he told Henry Ford – the founder of Ford Motor Company – ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.’ In 1992, Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, had clearly leaned out when he said: ‘The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is a pipe dream driven by greed.’ And the former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer had certainly leaned out when he laughed at Apple and said, ‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.

The Ford Motor Company, his third venture, changed the world. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently,” he said.

Many such top performers overcame their average—or even below-average—intellects and nonexistent aptitudes to develop outstanding abilities in disciplines such as chess, music, business, and medicine. Examples of such remarkable transformations abound throughout history. Henry Ford failed in business several times and was flat broke five times before he founded the Ford Motor Company. In his youth, Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.” Beethoven was so awkward on the violin that his teachers believed him hopeless as a composer.

We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors.

We went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

You guys need to get your act together, because if you don't, then the board's going to have to step in and resolve the issue," the directors warned them. "It would be better if you could work together to define your roles in a complementary way and leverage your strengths. You better give that a real hard try.

One of the optional subjects that we could study at Eton was motor mechanics, roughly translated as “find an old banger, pimp it up, remove the exhaust, and rag it around the fields until it dies.” Perfect. I found an exhausted-looking, old brown Ford Cortina station wagon that I bought for thirty pounds, and, with some friends, we geared it up big-time. As we were only sixteen we weren’t allowed to take it on the road, but I reckoned with my seventeenth birthday looming that it would be perfect as my first, road-legal car. The only problem was that I needed to have it pass inspection, and to do that I had to get it to a garage. This involved having an adult drive with me. I persuaded Mr. Quibell that there was no better way that he could possibly spend a Saturday afternoon than drive me to a repair garage (in his beloved Slough). I had managed to take a lucky diving catch for the house cricket team the day before, so was in Mr. Quibell’s good books--and he relented. As soon as we got to the outskirts of Slough, though, the engine started to smoke--big-time. Soon, Mr. Quibell had to have the windshield wipers on full power, acting as a fan just to clear the smoke that was pouring out of the hood. By the time we made it to the garage the engine was red-hot and it came as no surprise that my car failed its inspection--on more counts than any car the garage had seen for a long time, they told me. It was back to the drawing board, but it was a great example of what a good father figure Mr. Quibell was to all those in his charge--especially to those boys who really tried, in whatever field it was. And I have always been, above all, a trier. I haven’t always succeeded, and I haven’t always had the most talent, but I have always given of myself with great enthusiasm--and that counts for a lot. In fact my dad had always told me that if I could be the most enthusiastic person I knew then I would do well. I never forgot that. And he was right. I mean, who doesn’t like to work with enthusiastic folk?

According to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies—International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and du Pont—had become deeply involved in German weapons production, in part because of difficulties in repatriating profits from more conventional business.

Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. One of the richest men in the world in the early twentieth century, Ford was a modern version of the kind of extremist demagogue Hamilton had warned against. Using his Dearborn Independent as a megaphone, he railed against bankers, Jews, and Bolsheviks, publishing articles claiming that Jewish banking interests were conspiring against America. His views attracted praise from racists worldwide.

Examples of such remarkable transformations abound throughout history. Henry Ford failed in business several times and was flat broke five times before he founded the Ford Motor Company.

I love the wheels, I mean steering wheel.

The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102

he wanted to shed light on the fact that several brains pondering about the same problem are more effective than one single brain. Napoleon Hill interviewed successful entrepreneurs like the steel baron Andrew Carnegie, the founder of Ford Motor Company Henry Ford, and the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas A. Edison. They all surrounded themselves with a small group of trusted advisers. Even though they always made the final decisions themselves, they had at their disposal a range of intelligent opinions that could be utilised in reaching the final conclusion. Instead of only their own mind, they had a ‘Mastermind’ at their disposal. But it is not only other people’s knowledge

Consider Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company. One of the richest men in the world in the early twentieth century, Ford was a modern version of the kind of extremist demagogue Hamilton had warned against. Using his Dearborn Independent as a megaphone, he railed against bankers, Jews, and Bolsheviks, publishing articles claiming that Jewish banking interests were conspiring against America. His views attracted praise from racists worldwide. He was mentioned with admiration by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and described by future Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler as “one of our most valuable, important, and witty fighters.” In 1938, the Nazi government awarded him the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Yet Ford was also a widely admired, even beloved, figure in the United States, especially in the Midwest.

Ford actually figured out how much money to set aside for accounts payable each month by weighing its bills on a scale.

Development kicked into gear soon after Ford Motor Co. sold most of its 33.4 percent controlling stake in Mazda in 2008,

Seven of the 30 largest U.S. corporations paid more money to their chief executives last year than they paid in U.S. federal income taxes, according to a study. The seven companies cited were Verizon, Boeing, Ford, Chevron, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and General Motors. A Verizon spokesman disputed the report, saying that the company paid $422 million in income taxes in 2013 and that "the federal portion of that number is well more than Verizon's CEO's compensation.

Sales for General Motors, the US’s biggest carmaker by sales, were 9 per cent up on last July, while Ford, the market number two, was 9.6 per cent up, and Chrysler, number four, rose 20 per cent.

The whole industrial strength of the United States, should it be directed toward war-making, would constitute power never dreamed of before in the history of Armageddon. . . . It would be a struggle in which all our strength would be needed—and the penalty for being unable to use all our strength would be the loss of everything we had.

The Fords were the first in the country to lay a concrete landing strip, the first to build an airport hotel for out-of-town flyboys (the 108-room Dearborn Inn, which is still there), and the first private company to take on a US Air Mail Service contract.

The magnitude of the underfunding was astronomical. One study of just the 348 companies in the S&P 500 with defined benefit pension programs concluded that this underfunding amounted to between $184 and $323 billion (if non-pension benefits, such as health benefits, are included, the deficit is in the range of $458 to $638 billion). A Merrill Lynch study showed that companies with off-balance-sheet pension liabilities that exceed their total equity value include Campbell Soup, Maytag, Lucent, General Motors, Ford, Goodyear, Boeing, U.S. Steel, and Colgate Palmolive. While the accounting standards may have disguised the true size of the pension liabilities, they were in fact real liabilities, obligations of the corporations to their workers. They represented a potential source of bankruptcy for many of America’s most important companies.

This millionaire’s brand of watch is a Timex; her husband’s is a Seiko (number one among millionaires). The couple buys their clothes at Dillard’s, J.C. Penney, and TJ Maxx. They have purchased only two motor vehicles in the past 10 years: both Fords.

If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they simply would have said a faster horse. —attributed to Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company Your

After the war, successive British governments urged BMC especially (they had less influence over US-owned Ford, or General Motors’ subsidiaries in the UK) to sell every car they could overseas—as part of the desperate search for foreign currency earnings to offset the country’s huge war debts (the official government export target at the end of the 1940s was 75 percent of all UK car production). The company duly and deliberately neglected quality control in favor of rapid output.

The well-known author Napoleon Hill described this principle as ‘The Mastermind’ in his work Think and Grow Rich, which was published in 1937. With this expression he wanted to shed light on the fact that several brains pondering about the same problem are more effective than one single brain. Napoleon Hill interviewed successful entrepreneurs like the steel baron Andrew Carnegie, the founder of Ford Motor Company Henry Ford, and the inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas A. Edison. They all surrounded themselves with a small group of trusted advisers. Even though they always made the final decisions themselves, they had at their disposal a range of intelligent opinions that could be utilised in reaching the final conclusion. Instead of only their own mind, they had a ‘Mastermind’ at their disposal.

movement

Doubting Thomases scoffed scornfully when Henry Ford tried out his first crudely built automobile on the streets of Detroit. Some said the thing never would become practical. Others said no one would pay money for such a contraption. Ford said, “I’ll belt the earth with dependable motor cars,” and he did! For the benefit of those seeking vast riches, let it be remembered that practically the sole difference between Henry Ford and a majority of workers is this—Ford had a mind and controlled it. The others have minds which they do not try to control.

God is not an "object" of scientific observation in this world. Even if you understood every individual part of a Ford motor car, took it apart and analyzed each piece, you still wouldn't find Henry Ford. And the car would no longer run. Yet a whole [running] Ford motor car is a beautiful testimony to a person named Henry Ford. God may not be a thing in His world, yet the whole thing can bear testimony to it's maker.

We need to stop planning products to fill plants,” he told the board. “We need to match production to the actual demand.

siblings and was raised by his mother and father, Stephen and Viola Engel Armstrong. From an early age, he showed tremendous interest in the night sky, and spent much time looking at the stars through a telescope owned by one of his neighbors. The Ford 'Tin Goose' - image by Ford Tri-Motor creative commons Neil was only six when he enjoyed his first airplane ride, leaving the ground in Warren, Ohio. His father accompanied him up into the sky in a Ford Trimotor, also known as the Tin Goose. You could say that history was in the making that day because it stimulated Neil’s fascination with aviation, space and the skies.

noble in motive’ but disastrous in result.

The Quiet Revolution Detroit, 1979. U.S. auto companies were being threatened by foreign competition, and the Motor City became a symbol of American industrial decline. Chrysler would be subjected to its first (but not last) government bailout; the Ford Motor Co. was about to lose $1 billion for that fiscal year, and at least as much again in 1980; and GM’s profits were expected to plunge by a breathtaking $2.5 billion. Meanwhile, Japanese automakers were gaining market share; Toyota would soon surpass GM as the world’s largest car company. (A similar scenario played out in other industries too, especially consumer electronics and the copier industry.) Then, as now, the convenient scapegoat was the rank-and-file employees—in Detroit’s case, the unionized workers whose relatively high wages and ostensibly poor work ethic were initially blamed for the automakers’ problems. Only as Japanese wage rates reached parity with those in the United States and Japanese automakers began hiring American workers for their U.S. plants did some Detroit auto executives begin rethinking the narrative of blue-collar failure.

It was 1908 when Henry Ford unveiled the first Model T, a product that would reorient the infrastructure of civilization, and around which civilization would reorient itself. Just over a century later, Elon Musk unveiled the Model S at a time when civilization is more than ready for a cultural rebirth—one that could be catalyzed by something as innocuous as a beautiful car that drives itself. Autonomy, after all, is a term not limited to the automatic control of a motor vehicle. Its meaning also speaks of self-determination. It is through the power of this autonomy that we can turn a revolution into a renaissance.

Many major automakers have established research centers in Silicon Valley to work on autonomy, including Nissan, Toyota, Mercedes, Ford, and GM. The newcomers—Apple, Lucid Motors, Faraday Future, Byton, and Nio—have made autonomy central to their business models and established software development teams in California. Che He Jia and Singulato Motors are working on the technology in Beijing and Shanghai. In the meantime, other tech companies and start-ups, such as Uber, Lyft, Comma.ai, Nauto, Luminar, Aurora, Caracal, Starsky Robotics, and Zoox, are all chasing variations of the self-driving prize, be it for cars, buses, or trucks.

He’d never been the materialistic type, anyway. As evidenced by the fact that, currently, he slept in a tent and drove a mustang. The real kind of mustang, lower case, and not the upper-case car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company.

The Panther and Tiger engines were of a similar design: a motor unit encased in a solid armoured steel box, with the radiators in separate steel boxes on either side. This was intended to give protection from water if the panzer had to ford a river, because few bridges could take the forty-eight tonne weight of the Panther or the almost seventy tonnes of the King Tiger. But this protective design caused the motor unit to overheat easily in its steel coffin, and engine fires were a common problem.

De acuerdo con la revista de negocios Forbes, «otros fabricantes de automóviles ni siquiera se pueden acercar a Toyota en los costes de fabricación de automóviles» y esto se muestra en los resultados. «Toyota ganó 1.800 dólares por cada vehículo vendido, General Motors 300 dólares y Ford perdió 240», según Forbes. «Toyota tiene una ganancia neta mucho mayor a la ganancia combinada de las tres grandes compañías de Detroit», según la revista The Economist.

The tech start-up world from which Musk hails embraces disruption as one of its organizing principles, encouraged in part by the influential blog TechCrunch, which named its flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt, for the concept. Silicon Valley’s budding capitalists have long been encouraged to use their software prowess and processes to disrupt existing industries, and hence we have Facebook, which disrupted the news media industry, Airbnb, which disrupted hotels, and crowdfunding, which disrupted traditional investing. When Ted Craver asked Musk to share his thoughts on disruption with an audience of old-school electricity providers, you could see why the chairman might nervously fiddle with his pen. Could Tesla, with its emerging energy-storage business, disrupt the utilities? It might have come as some comfort to those at the conference that Musk is no fan of disruption. Indeed, he and Straubel were probably there to convince utilities to work with Tesla on energy storage projects that could benefit both parties. But the industry’s fear that it might have been on the wrong side of history would not have dissipated completely. The same was true for at least one auto industry leader. The man who, until May 2017, was CEO of the Ford Motor Company is one person who does appear to be a fan of disruption. Mark Fields, a Harvard business grad and Clayton Christensen follower, was fifty-three when he was appointed to succeed outgoing CEO Alan Mulally.

Advertisers need Facebook much more than Facebook needs any one, or thousand, advertisers. If Ford Motor announced they were concerned with the subterfuge of our democracy and were no longer going to advertise on Facebook, the Detroit firm would be commended for their actions in the media, and the market would promptly cut 10 percent off their share price.

Henry Ford failed in business several times and was flat broke five times before he founded the Ford Motor Company. In his youth, Thomas Edison’s teachers told him he was “too stupid to learn anything.