BFGoodrich: Tradition and Transformation, 1870-1995

Ohio State professors Mansel G. Blackford and K. Austin Kerr have produced a definitive 125-year history of the BFGoodrich Company. Company sponsorship gave the authors access to unusually rich documentation. In addition to the written record, Blackford and Kerr interviewed more than fifty present and former employees. They have used these sources to full advantage. BFGoodrich: Tradition and Transformation is a tribute to the collaboration between business historians and their sponsors. This history is not only a history of a modern corporation, but also a tale of the rise and decline of America’s domestic tire industry. It is the story of Akron, Ohio’s, boom as an industrial center in the first decades of this century. It charts the city’s decline between the 1930s and the 1970s as the rubber industry sought nonunion, lower-cost labor markets in other parts of the country. Moreover, it is a fine example of historical attention to the business context of technology.

B. F. Goodrich, who founded the company in 1870, was the first rubber manufacturer to move west of the Appalachians. He was attracted by Akron’s rail and canal transportation, low taxes and ample water sources. BFGoodrich was the first, and briefly the largest, of four extremely profitable companies that rode the crest of demand for rubber tires for the burgeoning automobile industry. It was also the first to founder.

Blackford and Kerr present an unvarnished tale of the firm’s decades-long failure to capitalize fully on technical breakthroughs, its clumsy handling of labor relations, and its historically weak executive leadership. In the 1920s, officers preferred to protect the company’s high dividends rather than invest capital in plant modernization. Competitors proved less shortsighted. By the 1930s Goodrich had slipped to fourth in market share, behind Goodyear, Firestone, and U.S. Rubber (Uniroyal).

Today’s company, the authors argue, grew out of Goodrich’s strong research tradition. In 1926 Waldo Semon discovered how to plasticize polyvinyl chloride (PVC). PVC, particularly as a plastic coating for wires, proved profitable after World War II. During the war, with government support, Goodrich chemists pioneered in the development of synthetic rubber. Postwar innovations included the tubeless tire and the development of radial tires. Though PVC proved a moneymaker, breakthroughs related to the tire industry did not. The authors convincingly demonstrate that again and again the company’s insistence on diversification made it too weak a player in the tire industry to capitalize on its R&D.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story of BFGoodrich is how an old-line manufacturing company located in the Midwest evolved into the sleek and aggressive high-tech and service company of today. When John Ong became chairman and CEO of the company in the mid-1970s, he began the process of transforming BFGoodrich. About the time he shut down the company’s last rubber plant in 1988 he was quoted as saying, “Well, I always knew that inside this bad, fat company was a great, thin company dying to get out” (p. 386). Convinced that the fat lady would never sing, Ong sold off the unprofitable parts of the company and set about changing the public perception of BFGoodrich as a tire maker. In 1985 Goodrich had 26,000 employees nationwide. In 1988 there were only 12,000 left. Ong also thinned the ranks of upper management, so that by the early 1990s he was one of the few remaining career executives.

Unlike the richly textured and balanced chapters that precede it, the last chapter appears to have depended rather heavily on the papers of John Ong and on interviews with him. Given Ong’s enthusiastic support for the project, it was perhaps inevitable that the authors would cede some of the critical distance that characterizes the rest of the book. They offer thin support for the claim that past traditions continue to influence operations of the trim company...