Henry Ford Museum¶

This week I’m visiting Shannon’s Grandparents In Michigan. As part of the trip we drove down to the Henry Ford Museum. The experience was worth the price of admission and we spent over five hours wandering the displays. I particularly enjoyed seeing the evolution of car bodies starting with carriage-like things.

The quote below stood out as I am currently thinking a lot about reputation. It reads, “You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do.” I understand the quote in two ways. First that your intentions aren’t substance for your reputation. And second that your reputation is based on what you’ve done. Those ideas are separate and I fall into the trap of ignoring each of them sometimes.

My final encouragement from the visit was noticing that Henry Ford was a tinkerer. He was a CEO who had built his own car from a kit before even starting his business. He experimented with marketing even his own model of car and failed with two businesses a decade before the Model T gained such popularity. No doubt, his intimate knowledge of his product and his application of that knowledge to the development of the assembly line is what made him eventually such a success.