William Clay Ford, Jr. Quotes
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I don't want anybody, whether it's my grandchildren or any of our employees' grandchildren, to have to apologise for working for Ford Motor Company. In fact, I want the opposite. I want them to look and say, 'What a difference we made!'
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In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers... He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.
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I look at safety as, you know, there's active and passive. Passive is how do you survive a crash. Active is accident avoidance. And so that's real-time information to you, as a driver, and to your car, to the wheels of a car that will get you out of a bad situation.
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Nature is where my heart is.
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My great-grandfather was a man of great vision, drive, and native intelligence, with some human flaws amplified by limited education, limited social range, and questionable influence from some of his advisers.
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When I joined Ford, in the late 1970s, I felt strongly we could not forever be a huge user of natural resources without there being consequences. But I was alone in my thinking in those days.
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I never wanted Ford to be a place, like the tobacco industry, where our employees were not proud of coming to work for us. I felt there was a danger of that, should we be marginalized as a major polluter.
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One of the things I've had the advantage of, growing up and being close to the top management of this company and other companies for most of my life, is seeing how CEOs start to believe in their own infallibility. And that really scares me.
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I think the world is filled with so much hype and PR bull. Frankly, it all comes out in the end. Good or bad, I'd rather just let our accomplishments really speak for themselves.
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The day will come when the notion of car ownership becomes antiquated. If you live in a city, you don't need to own a car.
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I don't know if a company can have a soul, but I like to think it can.
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I think I was the first executive to ever speak at a Greenpeace business conference, in London in 2001. That didn't play well here at Ford, but I thought it was an important signal to send internally, that these were the kind of issues we needed to be grappling with.
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I walked in and inherited a management group that I didn't know very well. They didn't know me, and we had a very short window to put together a credible recovery plan.
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Cars will talk to each other and the world around them to make driving both safer and more efficient. 'Vehicle-to-vehicle' and 'vehicle-to-infrastructure' connectivity will become commonplace.
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My father was a great business leader and humanitarian who dedicated his life to the company and the community. He also was a wonderful family man, a loving husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him, yet he will continue to inspire us all.
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Lyft is enabling an exciting new model of freedom and personal mobility, as evidenced by its millions of satisfied users.
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When we're in a peak, we make a ton of money, and as soon as we make a ton of money, we're desperately looking for a way to spend it. And we diversify into areas that, frankly, we don't know how to run very well.
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We took our eye off the ball as a company.
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Just think in terms of green energy and how much time, money, brain power and policy action has started to pour into green energy, and I think that's wonderful. We're going to need that same kind of effort towards global gridlock if we're going to keep the individual mobility that we all take for granted today.
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My father didn't push me.
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There's a rising tide of environmental awareness and activism among consumers that's going to continue to swell in the 21st century. Smart companies will get ahead of that wave and ride it to success and prosperity. Those that don't are headed for a wipeout.
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At Ford Motor Company, we believe the arts speak a common language that weaves a common thread among all people.
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The Ford Motor Co. should stand for something more than cars and trucks. There is a Ford way of doing things that we cannot lose... We need to be continuously polishing that Ford oval.
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One cannot find a healthy economy anywhere in the world that does not have a strong industrial base, period.