Henry Ford Never Asked

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

That epic, iconoclastic quote is widely attributed to Henry Ford, inventor of the automobile. There’s no proof that Ford actually said it, but his development of the modern automobile speaks to that mindset. The quote is apocryphal, speaking to a larger truth about how innovators sometimes see their customers.

Ford’s customers had opinions, of course they did; but he never asked them. Leaving aside how difficult customer research would have been at the turn of the 20th Century, Ford didn’t seem to care anyway. He felt he understood his customers’ needs better than they themselves did.

My Way or What Will Soon Be the Highway

After all, this is the guy who invented the red car, and then later took it away. The manufacture of black cars was easier to manage, because the drying times for the various black paints were easier to account for. One quote that can be pinned on Ford is…

“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

Ford wrote that one down himself.

Faster-drying paint mattered to Ford, because of how cars were made: on the assembly line, a process Ford made mainstream, which turned people into interchangeable parts.

The faster-horses quote has created a trap for entrepreneurs, suggesting that he or she with the idea exists higher up on a hierarchy from the consumer. It suggests that you’re already absolutely right, cutting short the ideation process.

Entrepreneurs like the faster-horses quote because it presumptively puts them in the driver’s seat of the process that makes driver’s seats. Seasoned entrepreneurs know that more rigor is required, that the first idea isn’t necessarily the best.

So seductive is the faster-horses quote that Ford’s own descendants have been known to use it, despite their scion having most likely never actually said it.

The quote is false in more than just provenance, though. What might have happened if Ford had asked his customers what they wanted? We’ll find out in the next post.