How to unlock the power of recombinant innovation
Wandering around Chicago in 1912 William Klann was a man on a mission. He was part of a team set up to explore ways in which they could reduce the costs of manufacturing a car to fulfil Henry Ford’s vision of ‘a motor car for the great multitude’. They had already developed many of the ideas behind mass production — standardized and interchangeable parts, short task cycle work, specialist machinery — but what Klann saw while walking past the Swift Meat Packing Company’s factory gave him an insight into a key piece of the puzzle.
The workers were effectively disassembling meat carcasses, stripping off various joints and cuts as the animals were led past them on a moving overhead conveyor. In a classic moment of insight, he saw the possibility of reversing this process — and within a short space of time, the Ford factory boasted the world’s first moving assembly line. Productivity rocketed as the new idea was implemented and refined; using the new approach Ford was able to cut the assembly time for a Model T to just 93 minutes.
(Not that the meat packers had invented something new — back in the early sixteenth century the Venetians had already developed an impressive line in mobile assembly. By moving ships along canals in order to fit them out for battle they were able to produce, arm, and provision a new galley at a rate of one per day!)
Forty years later the McDonald brothers pioneered a hamburger business based on fast service and quality food available at a competitive price. They’d been looking for ways to improve productivity and began applying Ford’s assembly line techniques to making hamburgers. Their partner, Ray Croc, helped develop their ideas further and pushed them to extend their reach beyond California. The rest is fast food history, with the company now selling more than 75 hamburgers every second and feeding 68 million people every day!
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