Page 104 - Free the Idea Monkey

the guy’s across the street. You make a deposit. Months pass. Your
designer comes back with drawings. You make changes. When you
finally agree on the design, a team of craftsmen get to work building
you a car. Flash forward to 1908. Henry Ford, with a magnificent
stroke of process innovation, puts most carmakers out of business
almost overnight with the introduction of the Model T, which was
produced on an assembly line, not by hand.

Now let’s consider the housing industry. It has been 100 years
since Ford changed things. You want one of those “green” homes that
everyone is talking about. So you meet with a person who draws one
up for you. You talk about the size, what it will look like, what kinds
of bells and whistles yours will include, and how it will be nicer than
the guy’s across the street. You make a deposit. Months pass. Your
designer comes back to you with drawings. You make changes. When
you finally agree on the design, a team of craftsmen get to work
building you a new home. Sound familiar?

Where’s Henry Ford when you need him?
Enter Rick Lavers. We met Rick Lavers when he was the CEO of
All American Homes, a company that is doing to homes what Ford
Motor did to cars. I predict that companies like All American Homes
will put traditional home builders out of business in the same way
Ford was responsible for winnowing the car industry a century
ago. Why? They assemble houses just like Ford built cars: on an
indoor assembly line that frees construction from the vagaries of the
weather and allows them to build 24 hours a day.
Why am I excited about this innovation? Because by central-
izing manufacturing, innovation can go into warp speed. Think
about where the car industry would be today if all the builders
were craftsmen spread out across the country. Building cars in cen-
tral locations makes possible experimentation, improvements and
learning every day.
So the takeaway seems clear: if you don’t learn from history, you
just may become extinct—an irony that was recently almost wasted
on the competitors of Ford Motor.

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