‘Big Bill’ Knudsen: Ford’s loss was GM’s gain
Ford’s loss was Chevrolet’s gain with this production guru. He became GM’s president, but there was a filial twist
ONE OF THE best buys the canny Henry Ford made was the 1911 purchase of Keim Mills of Buffalo, New York, an automotive parts manufacturer and supplier. With the acquisition Ford also got William S Knudsen, who would become known as a ‘production genius’. On the other hand, one of Henry’s worst moves was letting Knudsen leave and take his expertise to Chevrolet, which he rapidly transformed into Ford’s main rival – eventually knocking Ford off its number-one pedestal.
Born Signius Wilhelm Poul Knudsen in Copenhagen in 1879, he emigrated to the United States in 1900 with savings of $30 in his pocket. There he gained an anglicised version of his name and became a citizen in 1914, but he never lost his heavy Danish accent.
As a 21-year-old trying to make his way in a new country, he started work in the shipyards. He observed later that fights there were almost a daily occurrence and that, although Americans were very friendly, they also loved to fight with their fists and he was ‘more or less forced to become a boxer’. At 6ft 3in he must have been a formidable opponent. He carried some of the salty language of the shipyard into later life, and his boxer’s footwork came in handy when he took his grown daughters dancing. It was reported that he could ‘hoof for hours without puffing’.
‘Big Bill’ relocated to Ford in Detroit, where he became production manager at the Highland Park plant, the first car factory in the world to introduce a moving assembly line. Working for the autocratic and intransigent Henry Ford was never easy so, despite a substantial salary of $50,000 a year, he resigned in 1921. He told a friend: ‘All I’ve thought about is avoiding a quarrel with Mr Ford. I can’t avoid it if I stay, and I can’t stay and keep my self-respect.’
Within the year he had joined Chevrolet. It was nursing an $8.6-million loss, and consultants had recommended that the division should be closed. Chevrolet had been pouring money into an air-cooled engine project but Knudsen persuaded Alfred Sloan, the head of GM, to write off the investment and concentrate on improving the basic model.
In 1922 the previous year’s loss was turned into an $11.3-million profit. Knocking Ford off its number-one spot became Big Bill’s objective. In 1924 he addressed a gathering of 2000 dealers and famously declared in his heavily accented English: ‘Ay vant vun for vun’.
Knudsen introduced ‘Flexible Mass Production’, which allowed retooling for yearly model changes to be completed in a few weeks. At Ford the 1927 changeover from the Model T to the Model A took nine months to complete and required shutting down the factory. It was the year that Chevrolet not only achieved Knudsen’s ‘vun for vun’ goal but for the first time actually outsold Ford.
In 1929 Knudsen’s production methods allowed a rapid retooling for a new model, the famous Chevy ‘Stovebolt’, promoted as ‘a six for the price of a four’. By 1933 Knudsen had risen to vice-president of General Motors, and in 1937 he was appointed president. Ford and Chevrolet stood toe-to-toe slugging it out through the 1930s until World War Two brought the fight to a temporary halt. Chevrolet had won every round bar one.
In May 1940 Knudsen made the cover of
Time magazine for the second time, not on this occasion as an auto executive but as a Defense Commissioner. With Europe at war and American industry tooling-up to become the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’, President Roosevelt called on Knudsen to be chairman of the Office of Production Management. Knudsen accepted, declaring that America had given him everything he had, and he owed anything he could give to America. And he gave a lot, becoming a ‘dollar-a-year man’.
Knudsen spent the next five years supervising the greatest industrial production effort the world had ever seen, visiting 350 factories and flying over 250,000 miles. When the US entered the war in 1942 it commissioned Knudsen into the Army as a lieutenant-general, the only civilian to enter at such a high rank.
Knudsen returned to Detroit and General Motors in 1945 but died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1947, with one obituary declaring him a war casualty. He was the recipient of many awards in his lifetime, including the Danish equivalent of a knighthood from their king, which prompted his children to call him ‘Sir William’. Big as a man, he was a giant in the auto industry.
Semon ‘Bunkie’ Knudsen followed his father into the auto business, where he became an executive vice-president of GM in 1965. Then, in a remarkable twist, he resigned in 1968 to become… president of Ford.