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ОглавлениеThe Man Who Democratized Travel
The ordinary way of doing business is not the best way.
Henry Ford
Ancient history? No one in business today can remember the earthquake caused by Henry Ford, and even in business schools his case is rarely taught. Yet we will see that Ford’s story has priceless lessons for any ambitious entrepreneur or executive today.
When he was 45, and a moderately successful industrialist, Henry Ford took a brave stand that shook the world. The decision not only created his fortune but made him a leading architect of the twentieth century and one of the most celebrated and influential people on the planet.
He decided to simplify and democratize the automobile.
Video by Richard Koch: How Henry Ford’s Simplifying vision eclipsed all others in the car industry: www.simplify.fm.
Ford recalled the turning-point in his autobiography:
“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
This vision, he said, “led me to build to one end — a car that would meet the wants of the multitude . . . year following year, the pressure was, and still is, to improve and refine, and make better, with an increasing reduction in price.”4
The idea of democratizing the automobile inspired Ford. His great insight was that the key was price. If he could make a car cheap enough, it would, he believed, sell in vast quantities. He had some supporting evidence: in 1905–6, Ford made two models, one priced at $1,000 and the other at $2,000. The company sold 1599 cars that year. The following year he simplified both models and slashed the prices: “The big thing was that [my] cheapest car sold for $600 and the most expensive for only $750, and right there came the complete demonstration of what price meant. We sold 8,423 cars, nearly five times as many as in our previous biggest year.”5
It’s all very well to realize that price might be the key to expanding sales, but how did Ford manage to keep his prices sufficiently low to create a new mass market? His first idea was to redesign the product and make just one standardized, simple model:
“Therefore in 1909 I announced one morning, without any previous warning, that in future we were going to build only one model, that the model was going to be the ‘Model T,’ and that the chassis would be exactly the same for all cars . . .6
The most important feature of the new model . . . was its simplicity. There were but four constructional units in the car — the power plant, the frame, the front axle, and the rear axle . . . I thought it was up to me as the designer to make the car so completely simple that no one could fail to understand it.
That works both ways and applies to everything. The less complex an article, the easier it is to make, the cheaper it may be sold, and therefore the greater number may be sold.”7
So, by making a single product — for more than a decade, with few variations and options permitted — Ford could reduce his costs considerably.
He also paid great attention to the materials that went into his cars. For example, he pioneered the use of vanadium steel, a French invention that was both very light and very strong — ideal to create usefulness for the customer. There were initial difficulties to overcome: no steel maker in America could manufacture it. So Ford found a small company in Canton, Ohio, and covered the cost of the early trials himself. As he recounted, “the first heat was a failure. Very little vanadium remained in the steel. I had them try again, and the second time the steel came through.”8 The new product had a tensile strength of 170,000, about 260 percent that of normal American steel. The vanadium steel disposed of most of the weight in Ford’s car — decreasing fuel consumption — yet actually cost less than the traditional alternative.
The other plank of Ford’s low-price car was a new production system, geared to make vehicles at high scale and low cost. He built the world’s biggest factory — not just the biggest car factory — on a massive sixty-acre site at Highland Park, near Detroit. It opened on New Year’s Day, 1910, and the gain in productivity was marked: “Contrast the year 1908 with the year 1911 . . . The average number of employees [rose] from 1,908 to 4,110, and the cars built from a little over six thousand to nearly thirty-five thousand. You will note that men were not employed in proportion to the output.”9
However, although Ford managed to increase the number of cars produced per employee by nearly three times in just three years, and his cars became much cheaper to make than those of any of his rivals, the absolute level of efficiency remained low. The real breakthrough came with a proprietary innovation, designed by his production managers: the move from batch production to a continuously moving assembly line. This didn’t happen until 1913, and it was then that Ford famously insisted that all of his cars would be painted black, because only Japan black paint could dry quickly enough to keep up with the speed of the line.
The effect of simplification and scale was to move the price of a Model T down to $550 by 1914, when 248,307 of them were sold. By 1917, the price had fallen even further, to $360, with the result that sales soared to 785,432. In 1920, 1.25 million Model T’s were bought. Compared to 1909, a price reduction of 63 percent — to almost a third of the original price of the Model T, which was itself a good fifth cheaper than comparable cars — had resulted in a sixty-sevenfold increase in the number of cars Ford sold.
Compared to Ford’s sales in 1905–6 (the year before the simplifying strategy began), the sales in 1920 marked a 781-times increase. Simplifying made the company’s cars both easier and cheaper to make. And the price reduction was enormously effective in boosting the whole market as well as Ford’s share of it. By 1920, his share had soared to 56 percent, three times larger than that of his nearest rival, General Motors, which was an agglomeration of five different car brands. Ford was by far the most profitable car company in the world, both absolutely — relative to sales — and relative to capital employed.
Even Henry Ford himself was surprised by how much demand responded to the lower price. A price reduction to 35–40 percent of the original price boosted sales by more than 700 times. We shall see this pattern repeated throughout this book — the impact of a really chunky price reduction on sales is always grossly underestimated. The relationship between price reduction and demand expansion is asymmetrical. If you cut price by half or more, demand rises exponentially — by tens or hundreds or thousands of times. This is one of our most important findings. Radical cost reduction is one of the most powerful economic forces in the universe.
Henry Ford is our first price-simplifier. His overriding objective was to cut the price of his cars dramatically — to well below a half of the previous level. His case perfectly illustrates how cost and price reduction is not a one-off affair, but a gradual, continual process, fuelled by a few big innovations — in Ford’s case a simplified car model, standardizing on one model, and the moving assembly line — and a mass of smaller ones. Prices don’t have to be slashed in half immediately. Instead, a virtuous circle can be created, where the first cost reductions create a larger market and greater market share, with the benefits of greater scale subsequently lowering costs and prices, and raising demand further. What is essential, however, is a dogged commitment to achieve the lowest possible cost and price.
Though Ford’s main objective in simplifying was always to cut costs, he also simplified to achieve two other objectives — a more useful car (higher utility) and one that was easier to drive and maintain (greater ease of use). One reason why the Model T was more useful was that it used a new grade of steel that was both stronger and lighter than earlier versions. As a result, Ford’s car was both more rugged and more economical to run than its rivals — fuel consumption rises with weight. He designed the car for “simplicity in operation — because the masses are not mechanics,”10 introducing a “planetary transmission” that made the gears easy to change and the car easy to maneuver. Hence the slogan “Anybody can drive a Ford.” Because the car was simplified into four structural units (the power plant, the frame, and the front and rear axles), and these were easily accessible, no special skill was required to repair or replace broken parts.
All of these design changes combined lower cost with greater utility and ease of use. Specifically, Ford’s cars were lighter, cheaper to run and maintain, more rugged and reliable, and easier to drive, maintain, and repair.
For Henry Ford, a personal fortune estimated by Forbes in 2008 at $188 billion (in 2008 dollars), most of which he bequeathed to the Ford Foundation. Ford also invented the American answer to Marxism — “Fordism:” the mass production of simple, well-designed, cheap products, combined with high wages for workers. After the success of the Model T, Ford was courted by U.S. presidents and he even influenced, for good and ill, the industrial policies of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler.
For the Ford Motor Company, the creation of a powerful brand that has survived egregious mismanagement (including under Henry Ford himself and his son Edsel). The company has lasted over 110 years and currently is valued at $59 billion, having grown in value each year since 1906 by nearly 10 percent compounded.11
The creation of a huge global mass market for cars.
Greater freedom for the mass of people resulting from personal mobility, previously enjoyed only by the privileged few.
Ford foreshadowed some of the other great simplifiers who are discussed in this book, because they built on his methods.
1 One way to create a huge new market — with a different type of customer, only able or willing to pay a much lower price — is to simplify your product so that it is much easier and cheaper to make, and hence sell.
2 In order to price-simplify, you need to reduce the price by at least 50 percent. This does not need to happen all at once, but you need to continue cutting costs and prices each year — by about 10 percent a year.
3 Take a lesson from Ford:Redesign your product from first principles, cutting out unnecessary or costly parts.Reduce product-line variety and if possible standardize on a single “universal product.”Reduce the number of components.Eliminate frills and unnecessary options.Use different, new, lighter, and cheaper materials.Go for volume and production facilities that are far larger than those of your rivals.Organize tasks to maximize the specialization of your workforce.Automate tasks.
4 If you are a price-simplifier, cutting your prices is the primary objective. But, like Ford, also increase your product’s quality, utility, and ease of use if this can be done without incurring extra costs.
