id="u5b3eb16a-c1a4-5ba7-aa99-e08cc436d133">
CHAPTER ONE
Stop Being a Punchline
As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.
—Loser of multiple US elections
Six feet, four inches tall, gangly, but hunched now over his desk as he pens eighty-six meticulously written pages in fulfillment of his duties spelled out in Article II, section 3, of the Constitution of the United States of America. Nine hundred twenty-seven days before, he wrested his own party’s nomination from three better-known and more privileged rivals—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates—and began to change one of the great losing streaks in American politics. Depending on how you count, he had lost three or five or, some even argue, as many eight elections before rising to the highest office in the land.
One friend later observes the author’s “whole soul” seems consumed in the writing of the words contained in his eighty-six-page document. In this era, the author’s message will be hand-delivered and read aloud not by him but by the Secretary of the Senate. Only in the next century will the US president’s State of the Union Address become a spectacle in which the American world leader stands before his nation via radio and then television, hoping not merely to report but to inspire.
The message of December 1, 1862 follows a crushing defeat of the author’s own party in the mid-term elections, new and escalating cabinet power struggles, political unrest, and the horrors of Antietam, the bloodiest battle up to that point in the American Civil War.
Thirty days later, the author will sign one of the most famous edicts in the history of any nation: The Emancipation Proclamation. But the context for that signature to come must now be established with his own thinking, his own message, and with his own words, which include a long and fact-laden report on the progress of the war and the nation’s governance, words that contain some of history’s most famous statements and, in 1942, will inspire composer Aaron Copland to borrow excerpts in his evocative Lincoln Portrait. Here is a small part of what the author wrote: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
At America’s darkest of dark hours, no less a leadership authority than the sixteenth President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, calls on his countrymen to “think anew and act anew.” And today, more than a century and a half later, in governance and business, so are we once more called.
Why don’t we just call it “Edsel”?
—Ernest R. Breech, Board Chairman, the Ford Motor Company
In the history of modern business, there is one failure that burns above the rest in symbolizing utter defeat. The trouble begins with the name—the name Henry Ford gave to his son, who had served as Ford Motor Company president from 1919 until his death from metastatic stomach cancer in 1943. For a person, the name was unusual, but not as bad as, say, Egbert or Poindexter. But for a car, Edsel rhymed with Lemon.
Remarkably, Ford Motor management put a lot of thought into it—or, rather, paid Foote, Cone & Belding to put a lot of thought into it. The advertising giant put so much thought into it that they came up with a laundry list of 6,000 names, and, as if that were not enough, Ford marketing research manager David Wallace asked avant-garde American poet Marianne Moore to make suggestions. These included “Utopian Turtletop,” “Pastelogram,” “Turcotinga,” “Resilient Bullet,” “Andante con Moto,” “The Intelligent Whale,” “Varsity Stroke,” and, my personal favorite, the “Mongoose Civique.” In the end, Ford chairman Ernest Breech, who complained that he had hired Foote, Cone to come up with a name, not 6,000, ended the search by surrendering: “Why don’t we just call it Edsel?” Even the Ford family objected. No matter. Edsel it became.
Even today, if you send your browser in search of “Edsel” and gaze upon a picture of the car, you will find that an uncomfortable chill runs down your spine. It just looks wrong. Feels wrong, awfully wrong, like a high school chem lab experiment gone dreadfully, stinkily awry.
So, cast your imagination back to the late 1940s for the rarely told story of one of industry’s most earnest misfires and America’s single most famous innovation and marketing failure—a seventy-year-old inability to think anew.
The abridged narrative goes like this: The Ford Motor Company set out to create a car affordable for middle-class Americans that offered “futuristic” technology and looks to match. Great notion, but the two-lane blacktop to hell is paved with good intentions. Timing, design, marketing, and the cold dead hand of corporate incumbency transformed laudable aspiration into an unexpected, catastrophic, but well-deserved flop. Intent on innovating, Ford failed to follow through and thereby turned an innovative intention into a malignantly half-assed automotive punchline. Produced for only three years, which turned out to be three years too many, the Edsel achieved immortality as a symbol of marketing and innovation misjudgment.
Let’s turn back to 1948. Henry Ford II and his top executives order what will later be called the “Forward Product Planning Committee” to begin researching design and production of a new medium-priced car to capture as much market share as possible from industry front-runner General Motors. Ford management’s theory is that GM’s wide range of price offerings is contributing to its success. The Korean War, between 1950 and 1953, breaks Ford’s momentum on the project, but, nevertheless, the company performs a marketing study in 1952 that confirms an opening in the automobile industry’s middle market. It is a gap of opportunity between the bottom-priced Ford and the higher-priced Mercury.
Over the next two years, the company founded by the innovator of innovators, Henry Ford, seeks to design and manufacture this “medium-priced” vehicle for somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000—a target lying in the crease between discount and luxury buyers. The category Ford has in mind is one the company terms “young executives.” Bogged down during the uncertainty of the Korean conflict, work chugged back into motion in 1954, when leadership on the project is transferred from the company’s engineers to its stylists.
From the beginning, then, the project is more about styling than technical substance, more about sizzle than steak. The point is that as Americans enjoyed their postwar mobility, they also came to crave symbols of status and success—emblems of affluence. So, more than ever before, style is selling automobiles. Little wonder that 1955 is labeled “the Year of the Car.” In America, manufacturers sell a record 7,169,908 automobiles. And in this Year of the Car, Ford’s rival, General Motors, sees its stock roar. It is in this desperate context that Ford focuses on what it calls the “E-car,” short for “experimental car.” Figuring that it will take something “special” to beat GM, on April 18, 1955, management assigns the task of design, development, and launch to its “Special Products Division.”
Headed by executive Dick Krafve, eager to make a name for himself, the mission is to innovate a car to match or exceed the Ford Thunderbird, a model then enjoying excellent sales—something executives believe is at least in part being driven by the car’s name, itself a product of extensive scientific research.
Strike one. Behind Thunderbird there was thought. Behind Edsel there is Henry Ford’s prematurely dead son.
After two years of work and at least a quarter of a billion 1957 dollars (the equivalent of 2.187 billion 2018 dollars), the Edsel is born in September of 1957. It brings with it a daunting ROI. Ford needs to sell 200,000 cars during the first year to begin to recoup its investment. The number sales actually hit is far different. Over the next two years and two months, the company sells roughly 100,000 Edsels, losing some $350 million. In fact, in a period
