How a ‘cockamamie’ corporate structure resulted in the 1957 Ford

Former Ford Motor Company executive Donald Frey explained to David Crippen (1986) why he thought that the automaker’s “cockamamie” decision-making structure led to major quality-control problems with the 1957 Ford.

“As it turned out, preceding my days, [Ford’s decision-making structure] was probably the product of a McKinsey or a Boaz-Allen study, plus the Whiz Kids’ ideas of what industry was all about, from that Harvard think tank and statistical analysis group they ran in World War II. That’s where they all came from. . . .

Those suckers took the car business, and they chopped it up into profit centers within itself. It’s about like taking that radio there and making the division that makes the buttons — that’s a profit center. The division that makes the speaker, that’s a different profit center — a different management, all which report to the top. But they forgot who’s in charge of the device. Well, they put somebody in charge of the device all right with no authority, which was the Ford Division’s engineering offices where I was — where Hans [Mathias] was chief engineer.

I started out as executive engineer it was called. There were two or three execs — one for trucks, one for Ford and Mercury, and one for Lincoln — the big Lincoln. There were three of us. And we were to glue it all together, but we had no authority, so you had to do it with force of character and personality, because the transmission was part of Transmission Division. Chassis parts, which we designed the chassis, were made by another division. Ford Division had no manufacturing. They had the assembly plants at that time, but none of the fabbing operations, where the engineering and tooling of the parts was done, so all of the divisions that made the parts had their own engineering office, but the Ford Division engineering office was supposed to get everything together in one box, bolt it together, and see if it was an automobile. And, of course, the 1957 Ford was the perfect example of what you’d expect to get out of the system. Nothing worked. It was a collection of parts but not a car.

So I realized, after a year or so, l’ve got the problem but no solution, except I learned the method of making people part of a team. I had to extend it through all kinds of divisions over the years to come throughout the entire company — with no final authority. None. If they didn’t like the fact that I miscued myself, if I didn’t like their transmission, and I squeezed too hard, too quickly, and I said, ‘I don’t want that transmission. It’s failing. It’s your design and your tooling, etc.,’ they could go all the way up as high as Henry Ford for separate approvals and tell me to go bag my ass because I was interfering with their profit center. Now, those are all phony profits. The only profit of money is when you sold the car. The fact that we divided it all up and said, ‘For you, the transmission.’ That’s bookkeeping. That’s not market profit. . . .

I remember years later Hans said to me and we had things roughly put together and had some semblance of order and started a long process to start to make good automobiles in the full sense, which culminated in the ’65 Ford many cycles later — with his marvelous German accent ‘I do not understand. You take the same old questionable people, and you get a team with the same old people. But, you do.’ I said, ‘It’s probably fear.'”

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RE:SOURCES

• Crippen, David; 1986. “Donald N. Frey Oral History.” the Henry Ford. Interview recorded Jan. 28.

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