Profile

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 April 7, 1947) was an American industrialist, Entrepreneur &
founder of the Ford Motor Company and developer of the assembly line technique of mass
production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and
American industry. As owner of the Ford Motor Company, he became one of the richest and
best-known people in the world. He is credited with "Fordism", that is, mass production of
inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers. Ford had a global vision, with
consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to systematically lowering costs
resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put a
dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities on six continents. Ford left most of
his vast wealth to the Ford Foundation but arranged for his family to control the company
permanently.

Personal Profile

Born

July 30, 1863

Greenfield Township, Dearborn, Michigan, U.S

Residence
Nationality
Religion

Michigan, U.S
American

Occupation
Net worth

Business, Engineering
$188.1 billion, based on information
from Forbes ( February 2008)
Clara Jane Bryant
Ford Motor Company
Edsel Ford
William Ford and Mary Ford
April 7, 1947 (aged 83)
Public (NYSE: F)
Fair Lane, Dearborn, Michigan, U.S
Automotive

Spouse
Name
Children
Parents
Died
Type
Industry
Signature

Protestant Episcopal

Founded

June 16, 1903

Founder(s)

Henry Ford

Headquarters

Dearborn, Michigan, United States

Area served
Key people

Worldwide
William C. Ford, Jr. (Executive Chairman)
Alan R. Mulally, (President & CEO).

Business Profile

Products
Services

Automobiles
Automotive parts
Automotive finance, Vehicle leasing, Vehicle service

Revenue

US$ 118.308 billion (2009)

Operating income
Net income

US$ 2.957 billion (2009)

US$ 2.717 billion (2009)

Total assets

US$ 197.890 billion (2009)

Total equity

US$ -6.515 billion (2009)

Employees

176,000 (2010)

Divisions

Ford Credit
Ford division
Lincoln
Mercury
Automotive Components Holdings
Troller

Subsidiaries
Website

Ford.com

Field of Entrepreneurship
Henry ford work in Automobile sector. Most people credit Henry Ford with inventing the
automobile. The fact is he didn't, but Henry Ford held many patents on automotive mechanisms.
He is best remembered, however, for helping devise the factory assembly approach to production
that revolutionized the auto industry by greatly reducing the time required to assemble a car
Henry Ford is not of a prodigy entrepreneur or an overnight success. Ford grew up on a farm and
might easily have remained in agriculture. But something stronger pulled at Ford's imagination:
mechanics, machinery, understanding how things worked and what new possibilities lay in store.
As a young boy, he took apart everything he got his hands on. He quickly became known around
the neighborhood for fixing people's watches.
In 1896, Ford invented the Quadricycle. It was the first "horseless carriage" that he actually built.
It's a far cry from today's cars and even from what he produced a few years later, but in a way it's
the starting point of Ford's career as a businessman. Until the Quadricycle, Ford's tinkering had
been experimental, theoreticallike the gas engine he built on his kitchen table in the 1890's,
which was just an engine with nothing to power. The Quadricycle showed enough popularity and
potential that it launched the beginning of Ford's business ventures.
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His own racing cars were good enough to attract backers and even partners; Ford Motor
Company was founded on June 16, 1903. The first Ford, the Model A, was being sold in Detroit
a few months later. When founded, Ford Motor Company was just one of 15 car manufacturers
in Michigan and 88 in the US. But as it began to turn a profit within its first few months, it
became clear that Henry Ford's vision for the automotive industry was going to work, and work
in a big way. During the first five years of Ford Motor Company's existence, Henry Ford, as
chief engineer and later as president, directed a development and production program that started
in a converted wagon shop.
As with most great enterprises, Ford Motor Company's beginnings were modest. The company
had anxious moments in its infancy. Beginning in 1903, the company began using the first 19
letters of the alphabet to name new cars. The earliest record of a shipment of a Model A is July
20, 1903, approximately one month after incorporation, to a Detroit physician. With the
company's first sale came hopea young Ford Motor Company had taken its first steps

Motive of Entrepreneurship
Henry Ford's parents left Ireland during the potato famine and settled in the Detroit area in the
1840s. Ford was born in what is now Dearborn, Michigan on July 30, 1863. His formal education
was limited, but even as a youngster, he was handy with machinery. He constructs his first steam
engine (1878) at the age of 15. He became a machinist's apprentice in Detroit at the age of
16. Henry Ford is not of a prodigy entrepreneur or an overnight success. Ford grew up on a farm
and might easily have remained in agriculture. But something stronger pulled at Ford's
imagination: mechanics, machinery, understanding how things worked and what new
possibilities lay in store. As a young boy, he took apart everything he got his hands on. He
quickly became known around the neighborhood for fixing people's watches.
In 1891, Ford became an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company. After his promotion to
Chief Engineer in 1893, he had enough time and money to devote attention to his personal
experiments on gasoline engines. These experiments culminated in 1896 with the completion of
a self-propelled vehicle which he named the Ford Quadricycle. He test-drove it on June 4. After
various test-drives, Ford brainstormed ways to improve the Quadricycle.
Also in 1896, Ford attended a meeting of Edison executives, where he was introduced to Thomas
Edison. Edison approved of Ford's automobile experimentation; encouraged by him, Ford
designed and built a second vehicle, completing it in 1898. Backed by the capital of Detroit
lumber baron William H. Murphy, Ford resigned from Edison and founded the Detroit
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Automobile Company on August 5, 1899. However, the automobiles produced were of a lower
quality and higher price than Ford liked. Ultimately, the company was not successful and was
dissolved in January 1901.
With the help of C. Harold Wills, Ford designed, built, and successfully raced a 26-horsepower
automobile in October 1901. With this success, Murphy and other stockholders in the Detroit
Automobile Company formed the Henry Ford Company on November 30, 1901, with Ford as
chief engineer. However, Murphy brought in Henry M. Leland as a consultant and, as a result,
Ford left the company bearing his name in 1902. With Ford gone, Murphy renamed the company
the Cadillac Automobile Company.
Ford also produced the 80+ horsepower racer "999" which Barney Oldfield was to drive to
victory in a race in October 1902. Ford received the backing of an old acquaintance, Alexander.
Malcomson, a Detroit-area coal dealer. They formed a partnership, "Ford & Malcomson, Ltd." to
manufacture automobiles. Ford went to work designing an inexpensive automobile, and the duo
leased a factory and contracted with a machine shop owned by John and Horace E. Dodge to
supply over $160,000 in parts. Sales were slow, and a crisis arose when the Dodge brothers
demanded payment for their first shipment.

Challenges of the Entrepreneurship

Ford has responded with an enterprise wide initiative designed to focus employees on providing
quality products, strengthening the business and building a better world. Critical to this productled driveexpressed through the internal corporate motto Go simple! Go common! Go

fast! is a visionary enterprise information technology (IT) strategy designed to enable Ford to
reach new levels of operational speed, efficiency and flexibility. It is anticipated that through
systems integration Ford will ultimately transform itself into an on demand enterprise that can
respond rapidly to market opportunities and competitive threats.
From its financial, manufacturing and product development processes to marketing, sales and
dealership activities, the automaker depends on its global IT organization to keep businesscritical applications up and running. As part of the product-led transformation, Ford is unifying
and simplifying its entire infrastructure on an open, standardized platform that will strengthen the
entire enterprise. Web-enabled applications will run virtually anywhere in the world, around the
clock, and information will be delivered to employees, suppliers and customers in real time.

Virtualized computing resources will be allocated as needed. And autonomic capabilities will
enable self-managing systems to help align IT with business priorities.
The anticipated results are greater operational efficiencies and business resiliency at Ford.
Ford found his new system produced cars quickly and efficiently; so efficiently that it
considerably lowered the cost of assembling the cars. He decided to pass this savings along to his
customers, and in 1915 dropped the price of the Model T from $850 to $290. That year, he sold 1
million cars. Instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to
Ford, bringing in their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training
costs. Ford called it 'wage motive.' The company's use of vertical integration also proved
successful, as Ford built a gigantic industrial facility on the Rouge River in Dearborn, Michigan
that shipped in raw materials and shipped out finished automobiles.

Major Success in Entrepreneurship

Ford's philosophy was one of economic independence for the United States. His River Rouge
Plant became the world's largest industrial complex, pursuing vertical integration to such an
extent that it could produce its own steel. Ford's goal was to produce a vehicle from scratch
without reliance on foreign trade. He believed in the global expansion of his company. He
believed that international trade and cooperation led to international peace, and he used the
assembly line process and production of the Model T to demonstrate it. He opened Ford
assembly plants in Britain and Canada in 1911, and soon became the biggest automotive
producer in those countries. In 1912, Ford cooperated with Agnelli of Fiat to launch the first
Italian automotive assembly plants. The first plants in Germany were built in the 1920s with the
encouragement of Herbert Hoover and the Commerce Department, which agreed with Ford's
theory that international trade was essential to world peace. In the 1920s, Ford also opened plants
in Australia, India, and France, and by 1929, he had successful dealerships on six continents.
Ford experimented with a commercial rubber plantation in the Amazon jungle called Fordlndia;
it was one of his few failures. In 1929, Ford accepted Stalin's invitation to build a model plant
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(NNAZ, today GAZ) at Gorky, a city later renamed Nizhny Novgorod. He sent American
engineers and technicians to the Soviet Union to help set it up, [59] including future labor leader
Walter Reuther. Edsel Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Henry Ford pose in the Ford hangar during
Lindbergh's August 1927 visit. The technical assistance agreement between Ford Motor
Company, VSNH and the Soviet-controlled Amtorg Trading Corporation (as purchasing agent)
was concluded for nine years and signed on May 31, 1929, by Ford, FMC vice-president Peter E.
Martin, V. I. Mezhlauk, and the president of Amtorg, Saul G. Bron. The Ford Motor Company
worked to conduct business in any nation where the United States had peaceful diplomatic
relations:

Ford of Australia

Ford of Britain

Ford of Argentina

Ford of Brazil

Ford of Canada

Ford of Europe

Ford India

Ford South Africa

Ford Mexico

By 1932, Ford was manufacturing one third of all the worlds automobiles. Ford's image transfixed
Europeans, especially the Germans, arousing the "fear of some, the infatuation of others, and the
fascination among all". Germans who discussed "Fordism" often believed that it represented something
quintessentially American. They saw the size, tempo, standardization, and philosophy of production
demonstrated at the Ford Works as a national servicean "American thing" that represented the culture
of United States.

Specialty in Entrepreneurship
In 1908, Henry Ford began mass production of the infamous gasoline air polluting car known as
the Model T. Most people in the U.S. believed that automobiles would be powered by the newly
developed wonder of ELECTRICITY. What most people did not realize was that the Ford Motor
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Company was a SUBSIDIARY of the Rockefeller owned Standard Oil Company. When the other
car companies saw the vast profits that Ford was making on his gasoline powered Model T, they
abandoned the electric car, and began to produce their own air polluting cars. In the early 20th
century, National City Lines, which was a partnership of General Motors, Firestone, and
Standard Oil of California, purchased many electric tram networks across the country to
dismantle them and replace them with GM buses. The partnership was convicted for this
conspiracy, but the ruling was overturned in a higher court. Electric tram line technologies could
be used to recharge BEVs and PHEVs on the highway while the user drives, providing virtually
unrestricted driving range.
Henry Ford was a pioneer of "welfare capitalism", designed to improve the lot of his workers
and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men per year
to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers. Ford announced his $5per-day program on January 5, 1914. The revolutionary program called for a raise in minimum
daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers. It also set a new, reduced workweek, although
the details vary in different accounts. Ford and Crowther in 1922 described it as six 8-hour days,
giving a 48-hour week, while in 1926 they described it as five 8-hour days, giving a 40-hour
week. (Apparently the program started with Saturdays as workdays and sometime later it was
changed to a day off.) Ford says that with this voluntary change, labor turnover in his plants went
from huge to so small that he stopped bothering to measure it.
When Ford started the 40-hour work week and a minimum wage, he was criticized by other
industrialists and by Wall Street. He proved, however, that paying people more would enable
Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing and be good for the economy. Ford
explained the change in part of the "Wages" chapter of My Life and Work. He labeled the
increased compensation as profit-sharing rather than wages. The profit-sharing was offered to
employees who had worked at the company for six months or more, and, importantly, conducted
their lives in a manner of which Ford's "Social Department" approved. They frowned on heavy
drinking, gambling, and what might today be called "deadbeat dads". The Social Department
used 50 investigators, plus support staff, to maintain employee standards; a large percentage of
workers were able to qualify for this "profit-sharing."
Ford's incursion into his employees' private lives was highly controversial, and he soon backed
off from the most intrusive aspects. By the time he wrote his 1922 memoir, he spoke of the
Social Department and of the private conditions for profit-sharing in the past tense, and admitted
that "paternalism has no place in industry. Welfare work that consists in prying into employees'
private concerns is out of date. Men need counsel and men need help, oftentimes special help;
and all this ought to be rendered for decency's sake. But the broad workable plan of investment
and participation will do more to solidify industry and strengthen organization than will any
social work on the outside. Without changing the principle we have changed the method of
payment.

Financial Institution that Lone Provided

Ford & Malcomson was reincorporated as the Ford Motor Company on June 16, 1903 with
$28,000 capital. The original investors included Ford and Malcomson, the Dodge brothers,
Malcomson's uncle John S. Gray, Horace Rackham, and James Couzens.
They did not take any loan to the financial institution because all investors have sufficient money
to run the Ford Company.

Awards Provided

In 1928, Ford was awarded the Franklin Institute's Elliott Cresson Medal.
The United States Postal Service honored Ford with a Prominent Americans series
(19651978) 12 postage stamp.
He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson in
1969.
Ford was inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1996.

Future Plan
When Henry Ford told a New York Times reporter that ethyl alcohol was "the fuel of the future"
in 1925, he was expressing an opinion that was widely shared in the automotive industry. "The
fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples,
weeds, sawdust -- almost anything," he said. "There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that
can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the
machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years."
Ford recognized the utility of the hemp plant. He constructed a car of resin stiffened hemp fiber,
and even ran the car on ethanol made from hemp. Ford knew that hemp could produce vast
economic resources if widely cultivated. Ford's optimistic appraisal of cellulose and crop based
ethyl alcohol fuel can be read in several ways. First, it can be seen as an oblique jab at a
competitor. General Motors had come to considerable grief that summer of 1925 over another
octane boosting fuel called tetra-ethyl lead, and government officials had been quietly in touch
with Ford engineers about alternatives to leaded gasoline additives. Secondly, by 1925 the
American farms that Ford loved were facing an economic crisis that would later intensify with
the depression. Although the causes of the crisis were complex, one possible solution was seen in
creating new markets for farm products. With Ford's financial and political backing, the idea of
opening up industrial markets for farmers would be translated into a broad movement for
scientific research in agriculture that would be labelled "Farm Chemurgy."

Suggestion for the New Entrepreneurs

Henry Ford has some principles for the new entrepreneur or businessman
1. Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
2. If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security
that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
3. The best we can do it size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our
ability to deal with them, and then make our plans with confidence.
4. A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with
a bad one.
5. People can have the Model T in any color--so long as it's black.
6. Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
7. There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods
possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
8. Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of
scratching around for what it gets.

9. I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and
dream of it by night.
10. It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others
waste.
11. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on
making his own business better all the time.
12. A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They
will be embarrassingly large.

My Opinion
Henry Ford was an intellectual person who knew how to build up a new enterprise. When he
born this time the world economic system is not good but this time he generates some new ideas
and developed this. He utilized his think make a revolution in transportation system. He was
innovative entrepreneur. He designed any model that was the different creation from others. Ford
accomplishments teach us that success can be achieved through hard work and persistence. He
believes that if you are intelligent and know how to apply your intelligence you can accomplish
anything.

Criticism
Throughout its history, the company has faced a wide range of criticisms. Some have accused the
early Fordist model of production of being exploitative, and Ford has been criticized as being
willing to collaborate with dictatorships or hire mobs to intimidate union leaders and increase
their profits through unethical means.
Ford refused to allow collective bargaining until 1941, with the Ford Service Department being
set up as an internal security, intimidation, and espionage unit within the company, and quickly
gained a reputation of using violence against union organizers and sympathizers.
Ford was also criticized for tread separation and tire disintegration of many Firestone tires
installed on Ford Explorers, Mercury Mountaineers, and Mazda Navajos, which caused many
crashes during the late 1990s and early 2000s. It is estimated that over 250 deaths and more than
3,000 serious injuries resulted from these failures. Although Firestone received most of the
blame, some blame fell on Ford, which advised customers to under-inflate the tires in order to
reduce the risk of vehicle rollovers.

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References
http://www.ford.com/about-ford/news-announcements/press-releases/press-releasesdetail/pr-ford-motor-company-completes-sale-33059
http://www.ford.com/doc
http://www.reformation.org/henry-ford-pdf.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/hf/
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/henry_ford.html
www.mustangsandiego.com/.../02/Henry Ford
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAford.htm
http://www.google.com.bd/search?q=henry+ford
http://www.bing.com/search?
srch=106&FORM=AS6&q=henry+ford+ford+motor+company
http://entrepreneurs.about.com/od/famousentrepreneurs/p/henryford.htm

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