Henry Ford, take two

Before Jack Welch revolutionised business thinking, there was Henry Ford. He was the one who first thought of the benefits of assembly lines and large-scale production. His Model T made every sixth American a car owner. A new book tells us that while all this is true, Ford had his share of failures. Many of his plans misfired totally. He was not always a genius. "For the first half of his long life (he died at 83 in 1947)," says Bill Bryson in One Summer: America 1927, "he was little more than an accomplished mechanic." The Model T, when it was launched, was hardly a contender for automotive greatness. It didn't have a fuel gauge and a speedometer. The headlights ran on a magneto. As a result, the lights were woefully inadequate at lower speeds and tended to burst at high speeds. The front and rear tyres were of different size; drivers were required to carry two pairs of spares.

Many give the credit for Ford's success to his Canadian-born partner, James Couzens. While Ford attended exclusively to production, Couzens took care of finances, advertising, marketing, et cetera. The two squabbled frequently. Ford especially resented Couzens' $150,000 salary, which he calculated added 50 cents to every car he produced. The bickering finally caused Couzens to leave. Many say the car maker went into decline after his departure. Ford abruptly stopped production of the Model T even though he didn't have a new car ready.

While others, most notably General Motors, were catching up, Ford was occupied with his growing fascination with soybean. He wore suits stitched from soybean fibre and made experimental cars using soy plastics. The car, says Bryson, never went into production "because it never could be made not to stink". The dinner that Ford served to his guests included pineapple rings with soybean cheese, soybean bread with soybean butter, apple pie with soy crust, roasted soybean coffee and soymilk ice cream. So enamored was he of the commodity that he named his only child after the head of his soybean research division, Edsel Ruddiman.

To propagate his personal beliefs, Ford bought a weekly newspaper called Dearborn Independent and turned it into a general interest magazine. Ford toyed with the idea of running it like an assembly line: one person would supply the facts, next the humour, the third the moral instruction and so on. "Ford was persuaded to drop that idea," Bryson says, "but tinkered enough in other areas to ensure that the Independent was always terrible." One critique called it the "best newspaper ever turned out by a tractor plant". The newspaper, according to Bryson, was frequently used by Ford to vent his anti-Semitic views born out of the belief that a shadowy cabal of Jews was trying to take over the world. By the time Ford closed the Independent in 1927, the newspaper had punched a $4-million hole in his pocket.

Ford's biggest experiment was Fordlandia. Ford hated to depend on suppliers who might raise prices unilaterally or otherwise take advantage of him. That's why he owned iron ore and coal mines, forests and lumber mills, the Detroit, Toledo & Irontown Railroad, and a fleet of ships. When he decided to make his own windshields, he overnight became the second largest glass maker in the world. The only thing that he didn't produce was rubber, and he was the world's largest buyer of rubber. His solution was to set up the world's largest rubber plantation in Brazil. The South American country, desperate to revive its moribund rubber economy, allotted 2.5 million hectares of rainforests to Ford for just $125,000. He was allowed to build his own airport, railroad, banks and hospitals. Ford's dream was to build a model American community in the heart of Brazil - Fordlandia. But the costs of producing rubber were huge. Then the Great Depression happened. The demand as well as the price of rubber plummeted. The Fordlandia experiment was over.