If you look at Ford as a company, it has some characteristics in common with the other organizations being discussed today, and some things that are very different. One important difference is that to a first approximation, we have one product and its main attribute has not changed over the years. The automobile is something that provides a way of moving people and goods from place to place.

Characteristics that are the same at some level are complexity and scale. Ford is a very large company. It is the second largest company in the United States. The economies of scale are extremely important to this business, probably more important than to any other business in the world.

The other characteristic of an automotive company, which it shares with some companies but which makes it different from others, is that the automotive business is more appropriately characterized as a systems integrator than as a full-scale producer and developer of commodities. It is more like the aircraft business than it is like the microelectronics business, for example. And that has been true throughout its history.

The company is now 92 years old, and if you look back to the beginning, or almost to the beginning, what Ford has been is an extremely efficient mass manufacturer of personal transportation worldwide. It has the broadest possible customer base. The first Henry Ford had a very deliberate vision of selling vehicles to everyone, not just to the elite.

The business has always been a systems integrator, taking brake systems from somebody, electrical systems from someone else, glass from somewhere else, and having them put together. At one time, Henry Ford owned rubber plantations in Brazil, coal and iron mines in Minnesota, a shipping fleet to transport all of that to Detroit, a steel mill, an electric power plant to power the steel mill, a glass plant to make the glass for vehicles, a paint company to produce the paint, and so on. The raw materials went in at one end of a big complex, and cars came out at the other end. At all stages of their development, automotive companies have been systems integrators.

Is the vision or the broad statement of what we are still valid 90 years later? The answer is yes. Of course, the real question is what you do about today's business and research environment, which as we have heard, is very traumatic for almost everyone in industry.