every child big enough for tv i know can say ‘macdonalds’ and can influence their parents to bring them there when they really want to…
Bardis, Peruzzis, Strozzi, Medici…… The banker families of medieval Italy. The founders of modern corporations and accounting and the all time mightiest and most influential companies.
Did president Bush ask Microsoft or IBM for permission before invading Iraq? Or did he have to rely on Mcdonalds to finance it?
You can’t answer this any more than you can answer “who is the world’s all-time greatest athlete?” Michael Jordan? At basketball, sure, but ask him to hit a major-league (or even AAA) fastball sometime…
Different industries (and their impacts) are, well, different, much like different sports are different. Making meaningful comparisons across radically different industries is folly.
I think this sort of thing can spin circles forever, so I am not going to put out any suggestions. However, those who have dismissed Ford Motor have missed what Ford actually did.
First, no one claims that Henry Ford invented the assembly line. Whitney (and others’) interchangeable parts preceeded Ford by over 100 years and Ransom E. Olds had begun building cars on an assembly line before Ford borrowed the idea. This is common knowledge for those who have studied industry. However, Ford did make a whole series of innovations that went far beyond the assembly line in terms of creating a vertically structured corporation that could survive independently of outside factors.
Even that would have quite possibly been achieved by General Motors or Mitsubishi or Krupp at some point. However, Ford had a vision that went beyond manufacturing principles or corporate structure. Ford believed that he would make far more money selling to the masses than to the rich. He deliberately priced his cars low to entice more “common” people to buy them. (The mass production techniques he developed followed from the need to reduce costs and increase production.) Realizing the advertising value of having his own workers purchase his product, he induced millions of people to apply for jobs by offering 5.00 a day at a time when the typical manufacturing concern was paying between .90 and $1.15 a day. He had so many applicants thathe was easily ably to hire only the best. He then encouraged them to buy his $700 cars. In order to compete, other manufacturing firms had to raise their pay, bringing a massive infusion of disposable income to the working class and initiating the creation of a new middle class that was not directly tied to the merchant class. At the same time, no one could afford to pay laborers for the older methods of manufacturing, which encouraged companies to actively invest in automation when they would previously not have done so. The dependence on “unskilled” workers who were still sufficiently trained to handle the automation created a new class of labor who could effectively organize.
Now much of this might have occurred without Ford, but the reality is that it did happen through Ford. Does that make Ford the “most influential”? I don’t know. Other companies have had other contributions to history. However, Ford was responsible not merely for changes in manufacturing and product, but changes to society–changes that the U.S. has exported to other countries, as well.
80%+ of what your children read is all selected and published by one company or one of its subdivisions. Scholastic Inc. If that isn’t influence I don’t know what is.
Having thought about this somewhat, and in total violation of my earlier comment, I’ll nominate two companies jointly for the honor: the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroad companies.
Those two companies built the first transcontinental railroad, which effectively opened up the western United States. I’d rank that accomplishment behind only the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War in the degree to which it impacted the shape of American society.
The Hudson’s Bay Company practically created an entire COUNTRY. The East India Company shaped the destiny of several countries.
The DuPont corporation and its patents. Plastic, a by-product of oil for one.
Edison.
It’s Ford. Without Henry and Co., Bell Labs, Xerox, IBM, Coca-Cola, etc. wouldn’t have been. At least not as they are now, not yet anyway.