My highlights from this book:
1. “The most beautiful things in the world,” Ford said, “are those from which all the excess weight has been eliminated.”
2. Ford had just one sales strategy, and that was to keep lowering the price of the car.
3. The conclusion of his report is a succinct summary of what would enable Henry Ford to sell more cars than all the rest of the American automakers combined: “It is a first-class carriage, well thought out and well constructed, but embodying no novel feature of great importance. Novelty, rather than good design, has been the idea of most of the [previous] carriage builders.”
4. Henry Ford believed exactly the opposite. Make the car cheaper, not more expensive; you’ll do better selling lots of low-priced cars to farmers and shop clerks than you will a few lavish ones to millionaires.
5. He got $175,000, hardly a bad return on an investment of $10,000 three years earlier. But if he’d stuck it out for a decade longer he would have gotten $100 million.
6. He was not by nature a man to fall in easily with plans formed by others.
7. Mr. Ford was saying that unless an industry keeps wages high and prices low, it limits the number of its customers and destroys itself.
8. Ford didn’t like meetings at all. Sometimes in the middle—or at the beginning—of one, he’d spring up as if he had to go to the bathroom or mumble that he’d forgotten to check on something, always giving the impression he’d be right back. He never came back.
9. Ford saw every joke [about the Model T] as an advertisement, free as the air. Their ubiquity was one of the reasons he decided, in 1917, to cease advertising altogether.
10. By the end of 1919, Henry Ford held the largest company ever in the hands of one person. His operation was worth half a billion dollars, and he owned it completely.
11. One day toward the end of his life its maker was talking with a local high school boy named John Dahlinger and they got onto the subject of education. Ford spoke of the virtues of the McGuffey’s Reader era, and this sounded pretty fusty to Dahlinger. “But, sir,” he protested, “these are different times, this is the modern age and—” “Young man,” Ford snapped, “I invented the modern age.” The claim is as preposterous as it is megalomaniacal. It is also largely true.
12. Ford was born into a rural America whose routines he disliked as soon as he became aware of them.
13. From the start, Henry was interested in machinery. “Even when I was very young I suspected that much farmwork might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics.”
14. As so often in his life, Ford went after what he wanted.
15. The engine was fired by an electric spark, and he didn’t know much about electricity. To learn, he would move to Detroit and get a job with a power company.
16. He was thirty years old, far from young to be gambling his and his family’s future on a raucous novelty he’d improvised in time stolen from a respectable and promising job.
17. I cannot say that it was hard work. No work with interest is ever hard.
18. I draw a plan and work out every detail in the plan before starting to build, for otherwise, one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and the finished article will not have coherence. Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.
19. The automobile would descend not from the horse-and-wagon, but from the bicycle: lithe, supple, mechanically sophisticated, and, above all, light.
20. His first car, the object of years of steady work, had served its purpose and Ford “didn’t stop to play with it.” He sold it for two hundred dollars. “I wanted to start another car.”
21. Ford spent three days with the man [Edison] who played much the same role in the nineteenth century that Ford would in the twentieth.
22. When he was finished Edison banged a fist on the table so hard “that the dishes around him jumped,” and said, “Young man, that’s the thing: Keep at it!”
23. I had to choose between my job and my automobile. I chose the automobile. There was really nothing in the way of a choice. For I already knew that the car was bound to be a success.
24. Ford was looking toward quantity production but didn’t yet know how to do it.
25. Part of the problem was the scattered state of an enterprise that was still too nascent to properly be called an industry.
26. “I never thought anything of racing.” Ford later explained that he’d had no choice: “The public refused to consider the automobile in any light other than as a fast toy. Therefore we had to race.”
27. A little over four months after its formation, Henry Ford left the Henry Ford Company. "I resigned, determined never again to put myself under orders."
28. Ford by himself could not have managed a small grocery store, and Couzens could not have assembled a child’s kiddie car. Yet together they built an organization that astounded the world.
29. Ford suggested that this lightweight, inexpensive everyman’s car had been his lifelong goal.
30. Nobody would ever again be in a position to tell him what kind of car he had to build.
31. “You men are foolish,” said Smith. “The Selden crowd can put you out of business—and will.” “Let them try it.” Ford said, ending the negotiations.
Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.
11. One day toward the end of his life its maker was talking with a local high school boy named John Dahlinger and they got onto the subject of education. Ford spoke of the virtues of the McGuffey’s Reader era, and this sounded pretty fusty to Dahlinger. “But, sir,” he protested, “these are different times, this is the modern age and—” “Young man,” Ford snapped, “I invented the modern age.” The claim is as preposterous as it is megalomaniacal. It is also largely true.
12. Ford was born into a rural America whose routines he disliked as soon as he became aware of them.
13. From the start, Henry was interested in machinery. “Even when I was very young I suspected that much farmwork might somehow be done in a better way. That is what took me into mechanics.”
14. As so often in his life, Ford went after what he wanted.
15. The engine was fired by an electric spark, and he didn’t know much about electricity. To learn, he would move to Detroit and get a job with a power company.
16. He was thirty years old, far from young to be gambling his and his family’s future on a raucous novelty he’d improvised in time stolen from a respectable and promising job.
17. I cannot say that it was hard work. No work with interest is ever hard.
18. I draw a plan and work out every detail in the plan before starting to build, for otherwise, one will waste a great deal of time in makeshifts as the work goes on and the finished article will not have coherence. Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.
19. The automobile would descend not from the horse-and-wagon, but from the bicycle: lithe, supple, mechanically sophisticated, and, above all, light.
20. His first car, the object of years of steady work, had served its purpose and Ford “didn’t stop to play with it.” He sold it for two hundred dollars. “I wanted to start another car.”
21. Ford spent three days with the man [Edison] who played much the same role in the nineteenth century that Ford would in the twentieth.
22. When he was finished Edison banged a fist on the table so hard “that the dishes around him jumped,” and said, “Young man, that’s the thing: Keep at it!”
23. I had to choose between my job and my automobile. I chose the automobile. There was really nothing in the way of a choice. For I already knew that the car was bound to be a success.
24. Ford was looking toward quantity production but didn’t yet know how to do it.
25. Part of the problem was the scattered state of an enterprise that was still too nascent to properly be called an industry.
26. “I never thought anything of racing.” Ford later explained that he’d had no choice: “The public refused to consider the automobile in any light other than as a fast toy. Therefore we had to race.”
27. A little over four months after its formation, Henry Ford left the Henry Ford Company. "I resigned, determined never again to put myself under orders."
28. Ford by himself could not have managed a small grocery store, and Couzens could not have assembled a child’s kiddie car. Yet together they built an organization that astounded the world.
29. Ford suggested that this lightweight, inexpensive everyman’s car had been his lifelong goal.
30. Nobody would ever again be in a position to tell him what kind of car he had to build.
31. “You men are foolish,” said Smith. “The Selden crowd can put you out of business—and will.” “Let them try it.” Ford said, ending the negotiations.
Learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs by listening to Founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work.