Chapter 11: Ford's Palace Fight

For more than a month after his trip to New York, John seemed to have had bad luck, and all kinds of unexpected situations arose one after another, and he was overwhelmed. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. biquge。 info so much so that he finally had to abandon his plan to go to Harvard Business School to dig into the corner. But fortunately, McNamara, the famous "Blue Blood Ten Heroes" in later generations, will not graduate until a few years later, and John is not in a hurry.

The first thing that made John anxious was that there was a problem with the location of the new company. Of course, in Detroit, the Motor City, it's easy to find an office building for administrative offices. The challenge was to find a plot of land near Ford's Jung factory that would be large enough to build a giant logistics and warehousing operation center. It took Donald a month, and John made four consecutive trips to Detroit, before he finally landed at the former Ford Airport in Dearborn.

The airport was built by Ford in 1925, when it had just paid $500,000 to acquire all of Stout Metal's aircraft company, and was making an ambitious foray into aeronautical manufacturing. By 1937, however, Ford had sold its aviation division, and the airport had become a testing ground for Ford cars. After a phone call with Edsel, the president of Ford, John formally offered Ford to buy the proving ground, which was dispensable for them. His offer was fair, but he didn't expect the deal to pass Ford's board of directors.

This result surprised John. Edsel, the only child of Ford founder Henry Ford Sr., took over his father's class in 1919. Although John knew that taking over the company before his father died was a very technical task, not only to deal with his father's dictations, but also to prevent the company's top management from relying on the old and selling the old. But anyway, 18 years after Edsel took over the company, how could he still not control the board?

Although John had heard rumors of a feud between the Ford father and son before, he didn't expect Edsel to be so "useless". He originally thought that the old Henry was 75 years old after all, and Edsel was his only son, and as long as he persuaded Edsel, the plan would be almost half successful. Now, it seems, that's not the case at all. Upon learning of the final outcome of Ford's board, John hurriedly called his cousin Harold for advice. On the phone, Harold instructed him to visit a man, his longtime bridge partner, Ford veteran Sorensen.

Sorensen is the myth of the Ford Model T (in 1913 Ford developed the world's first assembly line, producing 15 million Model Ts at a rate of one per minute. One of the founders of Ford, who had a high reputation within Ford, was one of the few people on the board of directors who dared to oppose Henry Ford's opinion. Sorensen's home is on Belle Island in the heart of the Detroit River, connected to the city by a bridge, and the setting is secluded.

Sorensen met John in his garden, and it was clear that Harold had already communicated with him, so Sorensen readily told John about the situation on the board of directors of Ford. Sorensen told him, though old Henry would say, "What's the problem with Edsel." But in fact, the real decision-maker of the company is himself. He often asked Edsel to make decisions, and then intervened to overturn the decisions when they were executed. Once, when Edsel approved a plan to build more carbon coke ovens to expand steel production, Henry Ford was clearly against it, but he held back until the coke oven was built, and ordered the coke oven to be destroyed.

Sorensen believes that the root cause of the deteriorating relationship between father and son is Henry Ford's desire for absolute control of power. At Ford, the executive's career is often compared to an Indian rope trick — a performer who climbs to the top and then disappears. Because Henry Ford would have looked down on the person who sat in that seat, even if that person was his only son. Over the years, Henry Ford had stirred up tensions between Edsel and the rest of the company's senior management, because his own authority could be further elevated whenever there was discord between them, and thus he would always be an indispensable player for the company. On the board, Bennett, Henry Ford's loyal dog, is now increasingly powerful. In many cases, Henry Ford Sr. preferred to trust Bennett rather than his own son, causing Edsel to lose his reputation in his battles with Bennet.

According to Sorensen, the veto of the sale of the proving ground was Bennett's idea. Because Edsel was previously the head of Ford's aircraft manufacturing division. The airport-turned-test site is a sign of Ford Aviation's strategic failure. Bennett vetoed the acquisition because he saw the proving ground as proof that Edsel was incapable of leading the company, and that it was an important weapon for him to fight Edsel's prestige within the company.

Sorensen also repeatedly reminded John to be extra careful with Bennet, as he was not "decent people like you and me." The short, sturdy former professional boxer with a scar on his face was feared by everyone in the company. He served as Henry Ford's personal guard for 20 years, and was the most trusted man of the elder Henry. Because of his "excellent" performance in managing or repairmanship, and of course dealing with union issues, Henry Ford Sr. put Bennet in charge of the company's security and administration. However, Bennett was a man of great ambition, and taking advantage of the old Henry's favor to him, he began to eliminate dissidents at Ford, placing his own cronies and eyes and ears in various positions. In one fell swoop, he laid off 1,500 employees who belonged to the "service department" (a name for the company's internal security personnel) and recruited a large number of ex-prisoners to replace them. These ex-convicts play the role of thugs and monitors at Ford vehicles. Sorensen was very unhappy with these underworld in the factory, but others, and even some of the board members, were afraid of Bennett and his men.

Walking out of Sorensen's garden, John now has two big heads. Where is the board of directors of a world-famous company, it is simply a vulgar Qing court court fighting TV series in later generations. Edsel was the Kangxi Emperor who succeeded to the throne at a young age, and Bennett was almost equivalent to an arrogant and domineering worship. However, Edselby's tragedy is that his father did not become a Buddha like Emperor Shunzhi and was far away from the world, but popped out from time to time to hang a curtain to listen to the next politics, and wore a pair of pants with Aobai. When encountering this situation, even Kangxi himself is estimated to have to shrink his head first and boil his father to death before saying this trick. But Ed Selr didn't survive the old Henry and died in the head of the old Henry.

Historically, after Edsel's death, Henry Sr. did not even consider having his grandson succeed him, but took the helm of the company again despite his 80-year-old age. This desire for power is really incurable. In the end, not to mention family members and corporate shareholders, even the U.S. government can't stand it. At the time, during World War II, Ford was producing military vehicles and aircraft for the U.S. military. The army was in a hurry to get planes, but Ford's production never went up. The U.S. government looked at Old Henry as if he was about to sail westward, and hurriedly gave an order to Henry Ford Jr. (Henry Ford Sr.'s eldest grandson), who was training at the Navy Training Base: "Little Henry, stop training, hurry home and take over the Ford Company." There's no shortage of you on the battlefield, but Ford can't live without you. So little Henry rolled back to Ford. At this time, the "filial piety queen mother" of the Ford family, the wife of old Henry, stood up and threatened, she publicly threatened old Henry, if she did not open Bennett and hand over the company to her eldest grandson, she would sell the huge amount of Ford shares in her hand. So, two years after Edsel's death, his son finally did what he had never done in his life – truly took control of Ford.

Thinking of this, John himself regretted a little, why was he so careless in the first place, and he waded into the troubled waters of Ford without thinking it through. Before John could recover from his self-blame, the second thing that gave him a headache came again. Fred called him, and the team he sent to Ford to investigate something had happened.