Word: nordhoff
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...exihibit the discipline and intensity that were lacking yesterday.
...Poor Thing." Nordhoff accomplished his miracle at Volkswagen mainly by his love and knowledge of his business and an endless capacity for work. On a seven-day week, with only a few hours off for sleep, he started with 7,000 workers, and, after weeks spent clearing the rubble, began turning out the prototype bug designed before the war by Ferdinand Porsche. The product, he knew, was "a poor thing, cheap, ugly and inefficient." Its engine would expire after 10,000 miles, its brakes and springing were atrocious...
...Nordhoff had his designers revamp the old model, ordered some of the original Porsche designs redrawn ten times. He boosted horsepower in the rear-mounted, air-cooled engine, installed hydraulic brakes and shock absorbers...
Under what he called pressure-vacuum production, Nordhoff kept materials flowing heavily into his plant and insisted on immediate delivery of cars to customers. The combination, he believed, exerted psychological pressure on workers to produce faster. In six months, production almost trebled to 1,800 cars a month...
Although Volkswagen over the years modified virtually all of the bug's components and introduced new models such as a microbus and station wagon, Nordhoff held to his proven formula of keeping the basic VW's lines unchanged from year to year, thus improving resale value. Last spring, his own Wirtschaftswunder long since accomplished, Nordhoff announced that he would retire at the end of 1968, and in a typically efficient manner said he intended during his last months at VW "to put my house in order." He thereupon groomed Kurt Lotz, former chairman of a Mannheim electrotechnical firm...