Henry Ford helped establish the proposition that organizations were like a giant clock. Expert engineers took complex production processes and broke them out into simple steps. Groups of workers, each contributing only a small and simple part of the overall process, could ultimately produce the finished product. Thus was conceived the assembly-line way of doing business. The plant would run “like clockwork,” and produce a high volume of finished goods.
The assembly- line concept was hardly limited to smokestack industries. The narrow-repetitive-job, multiple-handoff approach at the heart of the assembly line model became the predominant general model for business. Banks, hospitals, airlines, utilities, government agencies, insurance firms, and many other types of organizations operated and grew with the mechanical model as the framework for their businesses.