henry ford was also pretty far from this warren buffett mode of letting the upper management of the company do what they want. very deeply involved in every level of the company, much like steve jobs

WRT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41417363 the story I heard about Ford management vs GM management was that Ford had a "system" which involved looking around at the heights of various stacks of reports in his office and intervening where he felt things were out of whack.

Upon reflection, if each sheet of each report, on average, dealt with about the same dollar value of things as the other sheets in its stack, then his system, far from being madness, would've just been an early, analogue and low-pass-filtered, lo-tech "business intelligence" dashboard.