An interesting experiment was conducted by this author, in collaboration with the students of a well known college. Each student was requested to write an essay on “How and Why Henry Ford Became Wealthy.”
Each student was required to describe, as a part of his or her essay, what was believed to be the nature of Ford’s real assets, of what these assets consisted in detail. The majority of the students gathered financial statements and inventories of the Ford assets and used these as the basis of their estimates of Ford’s wealth.
Included in these “sources of Ford’s wealth” were such as cash in banks, raw and finished materials in stock, real estate and buildings, and goodwill, estimated at from ten to twenty-five per cent of the value of the material assets. One student out of the entire group of several hundred answered as follows:
“Henry Ford’s assets consist, in the main, of two items, viz.:
(1) Working capital and raw and finished materials;
(2) The knowledge, gained from experience, of Henry Ford, himself, and the co-operation of a well trained organization which understands how to apply this knowledge to best advantage from the Ford viewpoint.
It is impossible to estimate, with anything approximating correctness, the actual dollars and cents value of either of these two groups of assets, but it is my opinion that their relative values are:
The organized knowledge of the Ford Organization 75%
The value of cash and physical assets of every nature, including raw arid finished materials 25%”
Unquestionably the biggest asset that Henry Ford has is his own brain. Next to this would come the brains of his immediate circle of associates, for it has been through coordination of these that the physical assets that he controls were accumulated.
Destroy every plant the Ford Motor Company owns: every piece of machinery; every atom of raw or finished material, every finished automobile, and every dollar on deposit in any bank, and Ford would still be the most powerful person, economically, on earth. The brains that have built the Ford business could duplicate it again in short order. Capital is always available, in unlimited quantities, to such brains as Ford’s.
Ford is the most powerful person on earth (economically) because he had the keenest and most practical conception of the principle of ORGANIZED KNOWLEDGE of any person on earth, as far as this author has the means of knowing.