Reading one of Pat Foster’s books on Willys. This one answers a question I’d been wondering about, and couldn’t find the answer in magazines or online sources.
Joe Frazer was the head of Willys from 1937 to sometime in the war. He didn’t design the Jeep, but he organized the effort to gain the contract for Willys and produce the Jeep. The Jeep saved Willys, and later saved Kaiser, then AMC, then Chrysler. Remarkable superpowers for a simple little vehicle.
After such a triumph, the CEO should be golden. What happened?
Ward Canaday happened. After Willys pulled itself out of its 1933 bankruptcy with the brilliant little Model 77, Ward Canaday colluded with John Willys’s ex-wife to buy a majority interest, and started running the company. He hired Frazer from Chrysler in ’37, and things went well for a while.
From Foster:
A close associate recalled Frazer one day gazing out the office window, watching Willys factory workers entering the plant. “You see all those people out there? Canaday doesn’t give a damn about them or the cars. All he wants to see is the stock going up.”
Soon afterward Frazer resigned in disgust. He then took over the remnants of Graham, and leveraged that position to create an auto division for Henry Kaiser. The same thing happened in ’53. Kaiser didn’t care about workers or customers or cars, didn’t understand the car biz, and refused to listen to people who did. Frazer quit in disgust again.
Frazer was a car guy who KNEW HIS CUSTOMERS and wanted to SERVE HIS CUSTOMERS by selling them good cars. He was never happy serving shareholders.
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