The same reading we give a founder we interviewed last month, applied to people whose decisions are a century old and whose outcomes are fully known. No hagiography. Each piece names the decision, the cost of it, and where the thinking eventually failed.
Ford is remembered for the assembly line. The harder decision was the one he made about price, years before the line existed, when nobody had asked him to make cars cheaper.
To fix the price first and force the cost of production to follow it, rather than set price from cost.
She had no capital, no advertising and no distribution. What she had was a decision about where the product would be sold, and a refusal to be talked out of it.
To sell only through prestige department stores, and to give the product away in order to get there.
She began as a washerwoman earning about a dollar a day. The company she built was less a product business than a distribution network assembled from people the economy had no use for.
To build the business around training and enfranchising agents rather than around the product itself.
Honda's American launch strategy failed almost immediately. What replaced it was not a better plan but an accident the company was fast enough to notice.
To abandon the product they came to sell in favour of the one their own staff had been riding around Los Angeles.
Strauss did not invent the riveted trouser. A tailor who bought his cloth did. What Strauss had was a business positioned to notice, and the sense to buy in rather than copy.
To partner with the customer who had improved the product rather than to imitate him.
