(UPDATED FROM 2/19/2021)
Histories written by practicing automotive journalists are usually engaging reads with lots of behind-the-scenes anecdotes. However, they can also be analytically superficial and grounded more in access than accountability journalism. In other words, criticism of automotive leaders may be ginger and stick mostly to a regurgitation of industry groupthink.
Richard A. Johnson’s book, Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry, partially followed this pattern — but with some noteworthy twists.
Johnson focused on connections between six men
Johnson, a now-retired reporter and editor for Automotive News, deviated from the usual practice of focusing on one automotive company or leader. Instead, he discussed six men: Soichiro Honda, Henry Ford II, Lee Iacocca, Eberhart von Kuenheim, Robert Lutz and Ferdinand Piech. And rather than treating each in isolated fashion, Johnson showed the interdependences between them.
For example, the author suggested that Iacocca’s revival of the Chrysler Corporation in the early-80s was heavily informed by his years at the Ford Motor Company, whose financial controls were developed in the 1950s by the so-called “Whiz Kids.”
Honda was quite rightly singled out as the “intellectual and spiritual godfather” of the six auto executives (p. 11). This is partly because he championed groundbreaking technological innovations such as the CVCC engine. However, in general Honda was easily the most independent-thinking automotive executive of his time. That proved to be the secret to Honda’s enormous success in the 1970s and 80s.
Six Men also challenged groupthink in a key area: industry consolidation. Johnson pointed to how the most successful automakers of the early-21st Century were smaller and didn’t get sidetracked by messy mergers and acquisitions (see third quote below).
Critiques could have used more analytical depth
Johnson deserves credit for not lapsing into full-fledged hagiography like Bryce Hoffman (2012) did in his overview of Alan Mulally’s tenure at the Ford Motor Company. Six Men included meaningful criticism of its subjects:
- Henry Ford II “killed plans for a front-wheel-drive minivan that could have benefitted Ford for two decades.”
- Iacocca “delayed his retirement several times so that his name really did come to stand for ‘I am chairman of Chrysler Corporation always.'”
- While leading Volkswagen, Piech was “surrounded by too many yes men” who failed to stop him from overreaching (pp. 377-78).
Six Men’s focus on showing the interconnections among automotive leaders is a promising approach that could use more analytical depth. For starters, Johnson’s narrative was too heavily steeped in the discredited “great man theory” of social change. This is a “19th-century idea according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes; highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect” (Wikipedia, 2019).
Sweeping statements overshadowed nuance
Even though Johnson offered criticisms of each of his six subjects, he mostly painted them in epic terms. Consider his take on Henry Ford II: Without him the “Ford Motor Company would have been squashed by General Motors, leaving behind an American automobile industry even fatter and more complacent than it was when European — and later, Japanese importers — entered the U.S. market” (p. 11).
Eh. Ford was not a bad automotive executive but he made enough mistakes along the way that surely others could have potentially matched, if not exceeded, his record. For example, if his name hadn’t been on the building, I question whether Ford would have survived the automaker’s enormously expensive — and disastrous — assault on the premium-priced and luxury car fields in the second half of the 1950s.
Also see ‘Who were the five worst leaders of postwar U.S. automakers?’
In an effort to highlight pivotal moments, Johnson had a tendency to paper over nuances that didn’t fit his grand narrative. As a case in point, he heralded the importance of the Whiz Kids’ analytical tools, which he argued were a meaningful step above those of General Motors. How then to explain the Whiz Kids’ leadership role with the massive flop that was the Edsel and the failed attempt to move Mercury upmarket? What about the Continental Mark II, which lost money partly because it was absurdly given its own division, plant and body (Bonsall, 1981)? And then there’s the 1958 Lincoln, which gained an all-new body only two years after its previous all-new body (go here for further discussion). The old-fashioned bean counters at GM would not have thrown money around with such abandon.
Sometimes Johnson’s superlatives can defy credulity. For example, he argued that the Honda Civic was “the first car in U.S. automotive history to draw owners out of their standard-sized American sedans into small cars” (p. 54). Really? What about the Rambler, Volkswagen Beetle or Toyota Corona?
Johnson succumbed to groupthink on gender
Johnson trafficked in industry groupthink on a number of fronts. He apparently didn’t see the value of selecting any women leaders, even as a means of shedding light on how much harder it has been for them to make an impact in such a male-dominated auto industry. He also perpetuated the story line that the 1956 Ford was a sales failure because it emphasized safety features; Ralph Nader argued that this was debunked by the automaker’s own publicly released data (1966; p. 90).
Six Men is a frustrating but worthwhile read — even almost two decades after it was published. Johnson made useful contributions to the historical record and did a good job of showing how the present is informed by the past. Perhaps most importantly, he offered voluminous evidence that the auto industry is a small world after all.
Six Men Who Built the Modern Auto Industry
- Johnson, Richard A.; 2005
- Motorbooks, St. Paul, MN
“Von Kuenheim modernized BMW, but he still allowed the engineers to dominate the company. For many years, von Kuenheim didn’t even give the top sales-and-marketing executive a seat on the management board. ‘He gives the engineers the feeling they are doing the most important job,’ said one BMW executive. And like Herbert Quandt, von Kuenheim seemed to have a sixth sense about everything going on at BMW. ‘The thing about von Kuenheim is that you could not lie to him,’ said one longtime BMW executive. ‘He knew everything.'” (pp. 70-71)
“Chrysler not only needed Iacocca, it needed the Ford Motor Company. Iacocca gave his new employer the kind of modernizing Ford had received in 1946. For the most part, Chrysler’s rescuers were ex-Ford executives who had learned from the old heroes of Dearborn. Henry Ford II’s turnaround of his family’s company in the 1940s was the model for all great automotive industry turnarounds in the second half of the century — the 1979-81 rescue of Chrysler, the 1992 revolution at General Motors, the 1991-2001 revival of Nissan by Carlos Ghosn and Renault. Iacocca was a strand of Ford DNA that transformed the cellular structure of Chrysler.” (p. 140)
“There were two automotive worlds at the turn of the century. One consisted of groups that had merged or had acquired other companies. The other was made up of companies that had not. The former represented the philosophy of Iacocca and Henry Ford II and the latter the beliefs of Honda and von Kuenheim. Against all odds and most considered opinion about the future of the industry, the independent companies were winning the day. The healthiest vehicle manufacturers in the world at the end of the century were the ones that had resisted major merger. They were PSA/Peugeot-Citroen, Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Porsche. The companies that jumped impulsively into mergers and acquisitions in the late 1990s were struggling. And their problems mainly resulted from the deals they had done.” (p. 225)
OTHER REVIEWS:
ForwardReviews | Automobile Hotspot | Jalopnik | Daily Turismo | Amazon
RE:SOURCES
- Bonsall, Thomas E.; 2004. The Lincoln Story: The Postwar Years. Stanford General Books, Stanford, CA.
- Nader, Ralph; 1966. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.
- Wikipedia; 2019. “Great man theory.” Accessed January 27.
This review was originally posted Jan. 1, 2020 and updated on Feb. 19, 2021 and May 17, 2023.
Huh ? I think reading too much into this book is perhaps an issue of understanding that it is the product of a journalist doing six informed interviews with six auto industry leaders. These interviews are snapshots in time. The finest automotive book I have ever read is by British author and historian Robert Lacey, “Ford: The Men and The Machine” (1986). Scholarly and well-researched for when it was written, Lacey put Iacocca into context. In 1943, when Henry Ford II was released from the Navy to take over the Ford Motor Company, the need was for structure, financial controls and strategic planning, which Tex Thornton’s “Whiz Kids” provided. It was Ernest Breech and Lewis Crusoe that persuaded H.F.II to approve Francis Reith’s five car divisions plan. Certainly Robert McNamara did not agree, so to blame all ten of the “Whiz Kids” for the Edsel-Super Mercury debacle is not accurate. “Whiz Kid” Ben Mills was appointed to clean up the M-E-L mess after James J. Nance resigned, which Mills did. Fellow “Whiz Kid” Arjay Miller became Ford’s President, instead of Iacocca until “Bunkie” Knudsen was hired by Hank the Deuce. Iacocca may have learned much from the “Whiz Kids”, but reading between the lines about Iacocca, I sense that these bean-counters cramped his style while he was at Ford.
James, your brief comment arguably assesses the Whiz Kids vis a vis Henry Ford II with greater nuance than Johnson did. In his chapter on the postwar rebuilding of the Ford Motor Company, he devoted as many pages to the firing of Harry Bennett as the rise of the Whiz Kids.
From a journalistic perspective I get why; the end of the Bennett era is a compelling story — and Johnson tells it quite well. But then his discussion about the Whiz Kids fails to reach beyond vague platitudes that could have been written by Ford’s public relations department.