Is Ford Running on Empty?

Picasso wrote:

> Its a good place to base a start. It is by no means perfect, but the

It's like pulling a robber baron out of the pre-Depression era and
giving him the helm of a modern company. Business is evolving, and it
does NOT make sense to base your future on old formulas.

Management styles are like any other technology. Take as a very good
analogy black and white TV - it went through a period of being
state-of-the-art and expensive but sought-after, then affordable and
owned by everyone, and now it is virtually free ($9.95 will buy you a
B&W television set, brand new) but nobody wants it because it has been
superseded by superior products. Free-to-air TV signals still work on
an old TV but you're missing a lot. When digital comes in, B&W TV sets
will be completely worthless.

Welch's pontificatory writings are in the same spot as B&W TV. His
ideas are still backwards compatible with modern businesses - JUST. So
they have some use, but it's small and dwindling. It would be stupid to
set up a facility manufacturing CRTs with blue-white TV-grade phosphors
right now, and it would be equally stupid to "turn around" a business
into a known dead end like GE's methodologies. Even GE is changing.