Business analogies. Ford Motor Company and Apple examples

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Any innovation in business - both in the production process and in the distribution of the finished product - needs analogies. It is through analogies that companies such as Ford Motor Company and Apple have reached unprecedented heights. Read about how to notice and apply analogies in this article.

Analogies fill our lives, but we are so used to them that we do not notice it. Once the phrase "desktop" meant only a real table at which a person works, but now it is immediately associated with a computer. Analogies help you look at things differently and find a solution where no one would look for it. Here are two stories of world-renowned companies Ford and Apple that owe their growth to analogies.

According to John Pollack, author of Bill Clinton's speeches and Shortcut, it’s foolish not to use analogy as powerful as it’s. Pollack believes that "analogy instinct" - the ability to see that some things are similar to others - is at the heart of innovation and sales.

Analogies are the living flesh of any business.

From the Ford Model T to the Macintosh, these innovations owe their existence to analogies. But before we tell the stories of famous companies, let's understand what analogies are for.

Transforming the alien and strange into the familiar

Here's a nice definition from Pollack:

Analogies are comparisons of objects, which presupposes the presence of any similarities between them, hidden or obvious.

Analogs can take many forms. An analogue can be one word, or maybe a whole story, especially if it contains a moral that inspires the audience with some kind of abstract principle.

We use analogies to use information from the outside world to make a decision. We receive new data, compare it with what we already know, look for simplifications and try to draw conclusions based on our experience.

John Pollack

In other words, we use analogies to simplify alien and unfamiliar objects, find similar features in them with familiar objects and use them for their intended purpose.

So we all, to some extent, think by analogies. But some business geniuses have reached unprecedented heights precisely due to the strong impulse of analogies.

About Ford and the meat

In 1913, Ford Motor Company was an ambitious company with ten years of experience, but at the time it had little or no influence on American life.

The company had an excellent goal of producing two hundred engines a day, but the manufacturing process itself did not allow for this. At that time, workers took engine parts from various rooms and rolled them on carts.

And then one day, Bill Clann, a Ford employee and former employee of the tram company, forge, machine shop and shipbuilding, went on a familiarization tour of a slaughterhouse in Chicago.

There, he saw how productivity could be increased through automation: animal carcasses moved along a conveyor belt in suspended carts, and butchers performed certain tasks as the carcasses arrived.

As Clann watched this bloody symphony of movement, he likened carcass cutting to assembling engines. Clann realized that moving the assembly line to the Ford plant could speed up production and lower the price of the product.

After returning, Clann proposed this idea to his boss: "If they can kill pigs in this way, we can also assemble cars."

At first, his boss disagreed. What could be more distant from each other than flesh and machinery? But Clann insisted they were the same thing.

As a result, Klann's idea was implemented, supplementing the workshops with moving assembly lines. As a result, productivity increased significantly and the more affordable Model T entered the market. The price dropped from $ 575 to $ 280, and Ford doubled its market share in a matter of years.

Clann saw the analogy through the superficial differences between the two industries - butchering and assembling machines. At the heart of both processes is the anticipation of the material before using it.

John Pollack

It didn't take long after Ford's success before other companies began introducing conveyors and earning high revenues in almost any area.

Steve Jobs is a master of analogies

Analogies work because they make the unfamiliar to the familiar, help the mind navigate an unfamiliar area, making it look like the area we already know.

In this regard, Steve Jobs's obsession with a friendly interface was dictated precisely by analogies. Apple was able to win public acceptance by making the virtual world, unfamiliar to users, similar to the physical world in which everyone is well oriented.

One of the main Apple analogies - the computer desktop - is so common that we've forgotten it's an analogy. It was needed to get people to use the Macintosh's graphical interface as easily as they used something real and familiar - their physical desk.

You can write something on paper, save it and re-read it later, and you can do the same in an electronic document. In reality, you can store documents and photos in a folder, and you can do the same in folders on a desktop.

You can rearrange folders on your desk - you can organize them on your computer too. What you see on the computer screen corresponds to what you know in reality.

Now these analogies have become so obvious and familiar to us that such an analysis can bring a smile. But in 1984 this was not the case at all. And Steve Jobs's instinct for analogies was the main reason for Apple's success.

How to get more from analogies

If you do not have an instinct for analogies, it is quite possible to develop it yourself. Analogies can be found everywhere, and you can practice, for example, while reading articles.

It's really important to pay attention to the language we use. The ability to approximate a familiar and familiar concept is an important part of the art of drawing analogies.

John Pollack

Another way to improve in analogies is to train to notice the correspondence of things, and for this you need to constantly enrich your experience. Most likely, Clann saw the correspondence between the production of meat and engines because before that he had worked in different areas of the industry and did not see much difference between many production processes.

Explore, read more, travel - by increasing your own experience, as well as applying the experience of the people with whom you work, you can become a master of analogies.

The most non-standard and creative solutions are born from the mixing of different sources of information. The more Lego pieces you have, the more opportunities you have to create something new and incredible.