The Factory Whisperer Who Helped Crush the Nazis

Simplicity x Accuracy = Speed of Production

While most US history classes cover the well-known story of how American manufacturing helped win WWII, there is usually little discussion into exactly how that colossal burst of production materialized in such a remarkably short period of time.

Whether your interest is in manufacturing, history, or politics - Freedom’s Forge by Arthur Herman corrects this oversight, his narrative focusing on a manufacturing legend named William Knudsen, who - after spending decades steering both Ford - and then General Motors to incredible manufacturing heights - was called to Washington by FDR to help lead wartime production efforts. Unpopular with New Deal politicians because of his ties to industry, and misunderstood by the public, Knudsen was in many ways both the Einstein and Elon Musk of modern industrial manufacturing.

While some people are known as “horse whisperers”, Knudsen was a “factory whisperer”, able to walk into any plant in the nation and after a brief tour immediately tell the local managers where and how and what to re-tool for maximum output. Having been at the epicenter of Henry Ford’s assembly line breakthroughs in Detroit, and then building General Motors to industrial supremacy, Knudsen had an unmatched knowledge of America’s industrial base as the nation geared up to meet the Nazi war machine.

Besides his encyclopedic knowledge, as he traveled a country on the brink of war, he was also able to clearly communicate the shift in mindset that manufacturers had to make in order to accelerate production:

“The less complex parts are, the easier they are to make;
the easier to make, the less the cost;
the less the cost, the greater the demand.

Speed produces nothing in manufacturing.
Accuracy is the only straight line to great production.
Mass production has never depended on speed
and never will. Speed, as such, is worthless.
The only thing that produces good work is accuracy.”

As this mantra of simplicity and accuracy took hold, starting in 1940 Knudsen led an 18 month sprint to re-tool America’s industrial base with the most advanced machine tools - the giant machines that accurately stamp out the myriad of products and armaments needed to win the war.

The production numbers slowly started to rise as millions of American men and women poured into factories across the nation. Confident in his bedrock principles of simplicity and accuracy, throughout 1941 and 1942, Knudsen continually had to reassure anxious politicians and military leaders that the production tide would turn. And turn it did.

Tomorrow let’s look at how this powerful mindset of simplicity and accuracy can boost individual goal setting output!