Buy Ford

  I can't believe the news today.  Now I know your about my age if that made you sing the U2 song Sunday bloody Sunday, one of my favorites of all time.  Anyway, I read that the car company GM is now 50% owned by the Federal Government and 39% owned by the UAW or United Auto Workers Union.  Now, I have had a lot of bad ideas in my day but this is the worst idea I have ever heard of!

  We have a government that has no idea how to make a profit or do anything that takes customer service, think of the last time you went to the DMV or called the IRS with a question.  Now partner that with the people who negotiated an $87 dollar an hour average rate for all blue collar workers and had no idea that this would make the cars to expensive and not competitive to foreign models.  So, who cares, they will just be out of buisness right?  Well there is the big problem, they have already taken billions from the taxpayers and my guess is they will continue to do so every time they need more.  Once again can you say bad idea! 

  Now contrast this with Ford who took no money from the taxpayers.  Founder Henry Ford I consider to be one of the great Capitalist in American history.  The Ford Foundation is a charity set up and funded by the Ford family and was given enough money to go on in perpituity.  Ford’s stock hit a low of $1.01 and closed today at $5.19. 

  Ford makes a great product, I sold my 1997 Ford Winstar this year, it had over 200,000 miles on it and never neded any major work and got a 2007 Ford F250 diesel truck.  But talk about an uphill battle, not only do they have the usual foreign competition that doen’t have to pay near as much labor costs, but now they have to compete against a company with an endless supply of our tax dollars.  I urge you to buy a Ford and support this great company for two reasons.  First to show that Capitalism is still alive and works much better than Socialism and second, because the US needs a world class manufacturer to keep our great country healthy and strong.

 

Konosuke Matsushita

I just finished reading “Matsushita Leadership lessons from the 20^th century’s most remarkable entrepreneur” by John P. Kotter.  This book introduced me to Konosuke Matsushita who was arguably as the title states the entrepreneur who went from the least, his father went broke and he quit school in the third grade to work as an indentured servant, to employing more people and making more profit than any other company.

Matsushita started everything with one concept.  He was not an inventor; he took existing products and made them 30% better and 30% cheaper.  His first project was a light socket that he thought he could make better.  Eventually he grew a consumer electronics company and had many brands that I really hadn’t heard of.  He was not into self promotion and his companies never bore his name.

The book did a great job of showing the highs and lows that he had to go through to become successful.  Some of the interesting concepts I learned from the book were, he never paid himself a large salary, never sold equity in his company for financing, demanded profitability from every division.  The one that blew my mind was he once wrote a letter to the Government in Japan saying they should save enough money that the Government is run off the interest like an endowment.  What a difference to how the US Government is funding things.

This was a real interesting book.  If you are an entrepreneur or like successes stories you will love this book.