Wheels for the World is Douglas Brinkley's 858-page corporate history of Ford Motor Company, commissioned for the company's 2003 centennial and written with full access to the Ford archives. It covers the full arc from the Quadricycle through the postwar decades, including Ford's antisemitism, the Battle of the Overpass, and Ford-Werke's use of forced labor during World War II. Brinkley is a respected presidential historian, and his Ford book is the most comprehensive single-volume account of the company.
Brinkley's Ford is the corrective to the sanitized founder narrative. Senra highlights that Brinkley does not flinch from Ford's antisemitism, his Nazi medal, or his company's use of slave labor — and argues that a founder's full record, including the parts that damage the brand, must be reckoned with. For founders, the lesson is that the same intensity and conviction that drives breakthrough innovation can produce catastrophic moral failures when directed at the wrong things.
Brinkley also covers the post-Ford decades — the Edsel disaster, the Mustang turnaround, the Pinto scandal, the SUV-era profits — in a way that shows how a company shaped by a single founder's values behaves after the founder is gone. Senra uses this arc to argue that institutional DNA is set in the founding era and can take decades to overwrite.
The scope of the research (858 pages, full archive access) makes this the definitive reference, but its length also means it is more of a reference work than a tightly argued business book. Senra treats it as the single source to read if you want the complete Ford story — warts, contradictions, and all.