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Alright, this is gonna be a Great Man story. 2 in fact: William Knudsen who left presidency of GM to head up office of production management, OPM under Roosevelt (funny how the OPM hacked by Chinese was “Personnel”), and Henry Kaiser, construction cartel boss turned shipbuilder
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“Their foes weren’t German or Japanese soldiers but Washington politicians and bureaucrats, shrill journalists, military martinets, the denizens of Big Labor as well as Big Government — and sometimes the forces of blind date.” Ok, it’s clear what sort of book this will be 😀
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Damn the neutrality/non-engagement decades were really anti-military: “From the 4th biggest military force in the world in 1918, the US Army shrank to number 18, just ahead of tiny Holland”
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Roosevelt started rearming in 1936, years before officially dipping neutrality and joins the war. If you want peace, prepare for war?
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Damn, early on Patton ordered nuts and bolts for tanks at his own expense from the Sears catalog, they were so short 😱
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1940: Roosevelt asks for 700 million in army appropriations, up from... 24 million. This, coming just 7 years after dumping the gold standard must have been a huge shock. How much is that in 2020 dollars?
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About 15.6B inflation adjusted. Drop in bucket compared to CARES act. But then, shit was low-tech and cheap in absolute terms then.
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“...on policy matters FDR was a procrastinator. He preferred to put off decisions — or at least to keep news about them from going public.” Hmm. The anti-Trump, who declares mission accomplished before it starts.
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Bernard Baruch, organizer of WW1 War Industries Board (and target of Nye committee) declines to do an encore for WW2. Don’t blame him.
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Apparently WIB didn’t manage to pull its act together in time for WW1 despite (because?) of strong economy. Baruch nominates Knudsen, who enters stage left.
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Hitlers response to FDR plan of 50k planes/year: “What is America but beauty queens, millionaires, stupid records, and Hollywood” Oh shit Hitler had 2016-America viewing palantir
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Knudsen starts off as an immigrant doing riveting work on the tough New York waterfronts and learning boxing. This is already cartoon grade. Marlon Brando plus Rocky.
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Montage of early industry career and now Knudsen is systematizing Ford’s assembly lines by 1916. The real Taylorism is Knudsenism it seems.
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Knudsen leaving Ford after high-level head-butting with Henry Ford, and going to Sloan at GM reads a bit like Wolverine leaving Magneto for Prof. X.
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GM is more interesting as an early business case study than Ford, even though Ford steals the technology honors. The invention of the federated conglomerate was a bigger deal than the assembly line.
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“Speed produces nothing in manufacturing,” Knudsen likes to say — which was one reason he eschewed the complicated time-and-motion studies of production gurus like William Taylor. “Accuracy is the only straight line to great production.” I LIKE THIS GUY
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He’s basically discovered “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” thinking in 1922. True flow thinking including lean vs fat tradeoff. Unlike charlatan F. W. Taylor. There’s an element of Elon Musk first principles thinking to Knudsenism.
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Knudsen set a “one to one” goal of matching Model T sales and got from 18:1 to 2:1 in a few years. He also invented model year system of annual updates. Damn.
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Aside: this was clearly the OG example of the Mac vs PC pattern. Dunno why I didn’t see it before. Probably because this is the first time I’ve read about the Chevrolet story.
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Kaiser was a dropout hustler who led with sales looks like. Makes his start in photography in upstate NY, then heads west to grow a hardware business, then lands in highway construction. So a hacker-hustler pair saved the US in WW2.
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Kaiser builds thriving road construction business in BC but WW1 makes the name Kaiser acliability do he he adds back to US and grows big there.
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Kaiser building thousands of miles of roads in the west. Early adopter of innovations. Steve Ballmer type seems like. Hard driving and hard working but subtler than Ballmer... not a bull type. Seems like he elevated roadwork from mostly manual labor to mostly machine.
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Now we have Kaiser orchestrating the Six Companies to build Hoover Dam. He spent most of the time in DC managing the political bosses.
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Huh, Kaiser apparently pioneered the internal competition model with Grand Coulee dam, which he later used in WW2 work. I guess that’s where the X/Y flyoff model originated perhaps?
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Interior secretary Harold Ickes skeptical of Knudsen; “I have heard that Knudsen even makes his own notes in handwriting” (presumably as opposed to a secretary transcribing shorthand into typewritten notes) Moron. If you aren’t taking your own notes you’re not thinking.
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Knudsen pulls together a sort of fellowship of the ring from across industry. They have to figure out what the military needs and tell them, because the military if 1940 doesn’t know.
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Finally into the war production story proper. We’re talking tanks, airplanes, engines. Building for US, British, and French needs all at once, 1939-41. Just a vast amount of action getting underway.
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Nice anecdote: a banker who has to transfer top secret Merlin engine plans meets the battleship bringing them from the UK with an empty suitcase. The captain laughs: the plans occupy a whole railroad-car sized crate of paper (would be a container today... or a largish USB stick)
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Spark plug and steering gear auto subsidiary companies commandeered into making machine guns. We’re still on Knudsen. Kaiser is trying to get in on the action but Knudsen doesn’t trust him. Yet.
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