Sublime

The problem, McLean decided, was the maritime mindset: Pan-Atlantic’s staff, experienced in the slow-moving ways of the maritime industry, did not know how to sell to an industrial traffic manager who cared not about ships, but about getting freight to the customer on schedule at low cost. McLean brought in a team of aggressive young trucking execu

Henry Ford was one of several carmakers who saw an opportunity to build a vehicle that combined the power and ruggedness of a touring car with the low cost of a runabout (i.e., coming in at less than $1,000). His company had launched a successful two-passenger runabout, the Model N, in 1906 for $500, and followed it up with the essentially similar

We set out to produce not for the chosen few but for the whole consumer public on the assumption of a continuously rising standard of living. Our interpretations of the significance of the rising standard of living marked an important difference between us and others in the formative years of the modern market.

Jim Hill worked incessantly at improving every aspect of the railroad’s structure and operation. He traveled back and forth along the line in his business car, looking for dips and bumps and spying out curves that could be straightened and grades that could be lessened. More than any other railroad leader of the day, he had an engineer’s passion fo

In engineering work in the drafting room, it was plain to the men to whom he gave his work that he could not make a sketch or read a blueprint. It was to his everlasting credit that, with his limited formal education, his mind worked like a modern electronic calculating machine and he had the answer to what he wanted. The trick was to fathom the de

Willis used to say if you get big enough, you can make an industry behave in a particular way.