| Sumario: | One of the greatest turnaround in American corporate history has been that of the automobile company Ford Motor Co. in the 1940s. What is most interesting about it is that it was largely the work of a man who was only 28 years old when he took control of the company and had little achievements to recommend him besides his name. He was Henry Ford II. Henry Ford had the idea of designing a car the average man could afford and to keep lowering manufacturing costs so as to be able to continually reduce the price and enlarge the market. This business plan made him one of the seminal figures of the twentieth century. Although Ford was a great mechanic and manufacturing innovator, he was not a great businessman. He refused to change his business plan with changing times. Ford's grandson Henry Ford II spent weeks reading his father's files upon joining the company, trying to get a grip on the company, deciding what needed to be done. The board of directors met on September 21, 1945, and put Ford II in charge of Ford Motor Co. By the time the elder Ford died, in 1947, Henry Ford II, a very gifted executive as it turned out, had ended the chaos of his grandfather's sad final years and begun to make the Ford Motor Co. once again a formidable engine of the American economy.
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