Critical Analysis and Review of the Leadership Capabilities of Henry Ford
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Table of Contents
1. INTRODUCTION
2. Henry Ford’s Key Capabilities as a leader
3. Henry Ford’s Key Weaknesses
4. Literature Review
4.1 Transformational Leadership Theory
5. Critical benchmark of Henry Ford’s leadership against the transformational leadership theory
6. Conclusion
7. References
INTRODUCTION
Henry Ford was born in 1863 in the State of Michigan on a certain farm. He went to school for eight years during which time he would help his father on the farm or he would go to Detroit to work in machine shops tinkering with internal-combustible engines. In 1888 he got married and went to live in Detroit where he got a job with the Edison Light Company as a chief engineer. His position required him to be on call 24 hours in a day. This allowed him ample time to work on his own projects and working on his lifetime goal of developing a petrol powered motor vehicle. In the year 1896 he came up with his own self-propelled automobile and gave it the name quadricycle (Stern, 2013).
In this period he, together with other influential people known as the Detroit Automobile Company, formed an organization. The influential people later left him because he did not want his inventions to be made public. His intention was to keep improving on the model as it was not ready at the time.
In the year 1902 he moved from the company, which at that time had been named the Cadillac Motor Company. In 1903 he was suited to market an automobile. He sprang into action by putting up the Ford Motor Company at 28,000 dollars which he acquired from the public since the wealthy people in Detroit had not forgiven him for the misunderstanding they had earlier on (Stern, 2013). He was involved in court cases for the next eight years for manufacturing an automobile since somebody had patented a vehicle and was given all the rights over any new vehicle that was manufactured at the time. The first legal case went in favor of his opponent but instead lodged an appeal to manufacture his car which he won (Stern, 2013).
During this time he came up with cars, albeit a small number. The vehicles were assembled by a groups of two or three workmen using parts that were made by other companies. His dream was to come up with a car which was affordable, reliable, efficient and available to the people. In 1908 he came up with the model T automobile which became so popular that it sold greater than 16,000,000 globally
He used different methods to change the car industry by putting together precision manufacturing and standardized parts and in the year 1913 he set up a movable assembly line whereby the workers maintained their positions and the cars moved passed so that the workers could add the various components. The result of this was a tremendous reduction in the time of completion of a chassis from 728 minutes to about 93 minutes (Stern, 2013).
As the years progressed by Ford paid a minimum wage, lessened the working hours and suggested that he would only build one type of car. His minor shareholders disagreed with him and they took him to court. He opted to resign, but this prompted more legal action and in the end after a heavy payout to them he owned the Ford Motor Company outright.
His focus was on stock levels in his productions that every day they would have enough ore to be used for the day’s production needs. He never allowed stock piling since it would come with other costs. The time they needed to finish up a car from the time the ore was delivered was a minimum 28 hours (Stern, 2013).