"Coming together is the beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success."
"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right."
Henry Ford (1863–1947) is a fairly clean LIE case, maybe with a conservative accent on Beta ST, which increases Se, as can be seen even in his "piercing" stare on the photo here. The LIE base accounts for the long-horizon vision and the business engineering of mass production at industrial scale. The imaginative-visionary side and the tinkering inventor's instinct from boyhood are all within range of the type. LIE is the most sensory of the intuitive types, but it remains intuitive, with both N functions reasonably strong, and the capacity to see a future that doesn't yet exist is part of its standard mentality.
The LIE business-engineering mind shows itself first in the structure of the Model T project, which was, according to Ford himself, "the work of forty years" (although it was in production only from 1908 to 1927) and the largest single industrial achievement of the early twentieth century. Ford's stated goal, "I will build a motor car for the great multitude", was articulated long before it was economically feasible and pursued for decades until it became so. The Model T price fell from $850 in 1908 to under $300 by the early 1920s, achieved through systematic efficiency improvements at every stage of the production process. The moving assembly line, introduced in 1913, cut Model T assembly time from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes. The vertical integration at the River Rouge complex coordinated iron ore mines, coal mines, glass plants, rubber plantations in Brazil, ships on the river, and finished automobile assembly into a single production system. The just-in-time inventory innovation reduced working capital requirements by forcing suppliers onto Ford's schedule. The cumulative effect was that Ford's company sold more than fifteen million Model T's between 1908 and 1927.
Ford's career was organized around projects with payoff horizons measured in decades, as appropriate for the most future-minded type of all sixteen. The early bets — quitting Edison Illuminating in 1899 to start a car company that failed, starting another that also failed, founding Ford Motor Company in 1903 with limited capital — were placed on the correct strategic conviction that automobiles would become a mass market long before any evidence supported this. Wikipedia notes, "his commitment to systematically lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system, which allowed for car dealerships throughout North America and in major cities on six continents."
The $5/day wage of 1914 is a good illustration of the type's reasoning. The standard industry wage was $2.34; Ford more than doubled it, instituted an eight-hour day, and added a profit-sharing component. Before that, the plant had been suffering a 370-400% annual turnover. The new wage, despite additional paternalistic requirements of home inspections to ensure workers live "proper" lives, cut it to negligible levels. One decision solving multiple efficiency problems simultaneously and increasing long-horizon margins by treating workers as a factor of production whose performance improves when properly compensated. Quite typical of LIE, who, in its list of Talanov traits, strongly disagrees that fining and punishing people is the best way to motivate them. Economist Nathaniel Smith in his article, Alert Judgment: Ford's Entrepreneurial Five Dollar Day, argues that this decision was risky: "When Ford acted upon this opportunity, he touched off market-wide changes that both created new opportunities in the labor market and destroyed outdated systems and firms that were unable to adjust. Yet Ford’s actions were not foreordained to succeed. The future is uncertain; Ford had to judge his plan’s profitability prior to its realization. Thus, Henry Ford exercised entrepreneurial judgment when initiating his revolutionary labor policy in January 1914".
Ford's general pragmatism is worth noting, because it shapes how his anti-Semitism should be read. Ford was not characteristically xenophobic in the way an exaggerated Beta quadra figure might be — suspicious of out-groups as such, demanding cultural conformity. The opposite was true. He hired Black workers when most Detroit manufacturers wouldn't, and cooperated commercially with the Soviet Union (Ford engineers helped design the Gorky Automobile Plant in the early 1930s, despite his stated opposition to socialism).
However, from 1918 through 1927, Ford bought The Dearborn Independent, published a sustained series of attacks on the "International Jew" as a mythical figure responsible for financing war and corrupting American life (consolidating them into a four-volume opus The International Jew), and promoted The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Jewish bankers and media owners in his account function as a wrench in the gear, the postulated cause of why the LIE engineering vision of a smoothly productive world kept being frustrated by forces he could not control. The tertiary "result" dichotomy contribution is real here too: result-oriented cognition, due to its desire for intellectual simplification, prefers tidy single-cause explanations to open-ended-processual analyses. At least, Ford did have the decency to apologize for all this in 1942.
The other failures of his public life — the 1919 libel suit against the Chicago Tribune that demonstrated his startling ignorance of American history during cross-examination, and the rigid attachment to the Model T past its competitive moment are more characteristic of a more static Beta ST accent. Ford did eventually modify the Model A in 1927, but the competitive position never fully recovered. His pastoral vision of an agrarian past somewhat contradicts his general future-minded nature, and signifies a somewhat blurred "democratism".
His grandson Henry Ford II had taken over the company in 1945 and had immediately begun dismantling the security apparatus and the residual influence of Harry Bennett, the brutal head of the anti-union Ford Service Department on whom Ford, in his old-age cognitive decline, had increasingly relied in his last years. Greenfield Village, his museum of the Industrial Revolution, and the Henry Ford Museum continue to draw visitors. The four volumes of The International Jew continue to circulate in the worst corners of the political world. Both are part of what he made.
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