Henry Ford – The Leadership qualities of one of history’s greatest innovators.
Executive summary
This paper set out to find out if Henry Ford was a capable leader or just a great innovator who took advantage of a good opportunity?
We looked at the leadership traits and style of Henry Ford and found that he was a great leader, however if he had to work in today’s business world he would have to adapt to the way modern leaders deal with managing change. The examples we found of Ford’s business practices suggested he had a very direct and dictatorial management style and after years of success he failed to adapt change to his business when it needed it most. As a result, rival companies seized on changing market trends, while Ford
…show more content…
Table 1.1 | Leadership | Management | Creating an agenda | Decide on the appropriate direction and create a strategy | Would deal with the delivery of the strategy, action plan and budgets | Developing people | Align people – get them ready for change and make them believe their efforts will achieve the goals set | Deal with procedures and operational structure including staffing requirements | Execution | Motivating and inspiring – Looking at intrinsic and extrinsic factors to increase performance and making sure everyone knows what’s expected of them. | Reporting on delivery against budget, making the relevant changes to ensure success. | Outcomes | Effective and successful change. | Provides a process of consistency and understanding. |
This kind of comparison not only allows us to see how leadership is adapted in an organisation but how leadership is different to management. The two roles are very different, but both work towards the same organisational goals. Where leadership will deal with change, whether that is as a result of competition or economic issues, like deregulation or change in consumer trends; management will deal with operational processes to reduce confusion and monitor development.
In contrast to this, Mintzberg (1977) believed that management and leadership roles overlap. That operationally, the concepts of the two roles don’t fit neatly
There is a difference between leadership and management, although they are similar in some ways. While, they both want to achieve common goals, influence people, and work with people, they are different. Managers aim to create consistency and
Management is working in the system while leadership is working on the system. They actually speak for themselves a manger manages people and work while the leader job is to lead people. Leaders and managers thinking process, goal setting, employee relations, operation and governance is all different. Leaderships thinking process focuses on people and looks outward while management focuses on things and looks inward. Goal setting in leadership articulates visions and also creates the future while management executes plans and improves the present. Leaders employee relations empowers colleague’s, trust and develops and manager’s controls, subordinates, directs and coordinates. Leaders operation does the right things usually creates change and serves subordinates but management does things right, manages change and serves superordinate’s. Leaders governance uses influences, conflict and acts decisively and manager’s governance uses authority, Avoids conflict and acts
Leadership is about getting people to understand and believe in your vision and to work with you to achieve your goals while managing is more about administering and making sure the day-to-day things are happening as they should.
Much has been written about the difference between management and leadership. In the past, competent management staffs ran effective companies. In light of our ever-changing world, however, most companies have come to realize that it is much more important to lead than to manage. In today's world the old ways of management no longer work. One reason is that the degree of environmental and competitive change we are experiencing is extreme. Although exciting, the world is also very unstable and confused. In an article entitled What’s the Difference between Your Hospital and the Other? Gary Campbell states that the difference between a manager and a leader is that the manager “finds himself quite willing to
Henry Ford was critical of anybody’s viewpoints that went against his own. Ford was proud of the Model T, but he did not want to change it, and this failing resulted in Ford taking a back seat to his competitors and suffering a declining market share. “Being open-minded means you’re ‘open’ to actively listening and thinking about an idea or solution (BCEE, 2017d, p. 4). Ford often stifled and undermined his leaders, to include his own son who had been given the presidency of the company. However, one of the best example to illustrate Ford’s lack of open-mindedness comes from author John Maxwell who writes, “One day when a group of his designers surprised him by presenting him with the prototype of an improved model, Ford ripped its doors off the hinges and proceeded to destroy the car with his bare hands (1991, p. 122). This example shows how Ford failed to adhere to the critical thinking characteristic of open mindedness by shutting down new ideas on how to improve the Model T. These traits directly contributed to the Ford Motor Company almost filing
Henry Ford was one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs in creating the automobile assembly line, it was his controversial characteristics and unorthodox approach towards administrating the Ford Motor Company which resulted in the conglomeration of one of the most successful corporations in the world. At the turn of the century everything was booming! The growth of the economy and stock market increased the job opportunities as well as morals. As a result of this industrial revolution, out of the woodwork came a humble yet driven man, Henry Ford. Between the five dollar/day plan, his policies on administrating the company, and his relations with his customers, Ford was often presented as a suspicious character. This
In accordance with an adaptation from The Wall Street Journal Guide to Management by Alan Murray, published by Harper Business, although leadership and management must function collectively, they are not identical, however they are unavoidably connected and corresponding; any attempt to disconnect the two is liable to initiate more complications than it resolves. Nevertheless, considerable effort has been consumed outlining the dissimilarities. The manager’s responsibility is to strategize and coordinate, whereas the leader’s responsibility is to encourage and motivate. (Murray, A., 2009)
There has been debate about the difference between leadership and management. With some believing there is no distinction, while others that they should be separated in two defined roles.
To fully explain the relationship between Leadership and Management we need to appreciate that the two go hand in hand, they are by no means the same thing but they complement each other when driving any team to perform and exceed targets within a business. The manager’s job is very task-focused. They often have to follow company
“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” (Henry Ford). Henry Ford is one of the world’s most renowned leaders for the automobile industry. The son of a farmer, Ford has always been interested in how things worked. He has improved the models of his cars to make manufacturing them faster and more efficient by using assembly lines. He also set a balance between his employees’ wages and hours worked. Ford never stopped innovating and it is shown in his later Models of his car. Ford set standards for future motor companies and set standards for modern day manufacturing.
Management and leadership are viewed as two different perspectives in the business environment. As described by Dr. Warren Bennis ‘Managers are people who do things right, while leaders are people who do the right thing’, this means that managers do things by the set rules and follow company policy, while leaders follow their own intuition, which may in turn be of more benefit to the company.
Leadership vs. Management, are they the same? No!. “A leader focus on setting goals and direction, challenging the norm, and seeking new ways of working towards the goals. On the other side, Managers specialize on conformance to the standards. They manage teams and individuals, organizing, directing and controlling to achieve goals” (EBA, 2016).
I have learned many lessons from Jack Welch on leadership. Jack Welch has been with the General Electric Company (GE) since 1960. Having taken over GE with a market capitalization of about $12 billion, Jack Welch turned it into one of the largest and most admired companies in the world by the time he stepped down as its CEO 20 years later, in 2000. Jack Welch used his uncanny instincts and unique leadership strategies to run GE, the most complex organization in the world and increased its market value by more than $400 billion over two decades. He remains a highly regarded figure in business circles due to his innovative leadership style. Jack Welch demonstrated Kouzes and Posner’s five practices of modeling the way, inspiring a shared
Some theorists use the terms ‘leadership’ and ‘management’ reciprocally as if they are tantamount with one another, while others use them in a very purposeful sense to express that they are, in effect, rather different (Bush, 2003). Organisational successfulness, it is generally accepted, is dependant on both competent leadership and consistent management (Dimmock and Walker, 2005) According to Grace (1995) they do not follow from one or the other, but
The concepts of leadership and management are often viewed in different ways with different theories and schools of thought regarding the meaning of these terms (Gold, Thorpe and Mumford, 2010). Management and leadership can be defined individually and encompass different roles and attributes, however, both management and