My Life and Work by Henry Ford (surface ebook reader TXT) 📖

the money that I make is inconsequent. Money is useful only as it serves to forward by practical example the principle that business is justified only as it serves, that it must always give more to the community than it takes away, and that unless everybody benefits by the existence of a business then that business should not exist. I have proved this with automobiles and tractors. I intend to prove it with railways and public-service corporations—not for my personal satisfaction and not for the money that may be earned. (It is perfectly impossible, applying these principles, to avoid making a much larger profit than if profit were the main object.) I want to prove it so that all of us may have more, and that all of us may live better by increasing the service rendered by all businesses. Poverty cannot be abolished by formula; it can be abolished only by hard and intelligent work. We are, in effect, an experimental station to prove a principle. That we do make money is only further proof that we are right. For that is a species of argument that establishes itself without words.

 

In the first chapter was set forth the creed. Let me repeat it in the light of the work that has been done under it—for it is at the basis of all our work:

 

(1) An absence of fear of the future or of veneration for the past. One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.

 

(2) A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another man—criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the condition of one’s fellow-men, to rule by force instead of by intelligence.

 

(3) The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit.

Well-conducted business enterprises cannot fail to return a profit but profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It cannot be the basis—it must be the result of service.

 

(4) Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and distributing it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing tend only to clog this progression.

 

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We must have production, but it is the spirit behind it that counts most. That kind of production which is a service inevitably follows a real desire to be of service. The various wholly artificial rules set up for finance and industry and which pass as “laws” break down with such frequency as to prove that they are not even good guesses. The basis of all economic reasoning is the earth and its products. To make the yield of the earth, in all its forms, large enough and dependable enough to serve as the basis for real life—the life which is more than eating and sleeping—is the highest service. That is the real foundation for an economic system. We can make things—the problem of production has been solved brilliantly. We can make any number of different sort of things by the millions. The material mode of our life is splendidly provided for. There are enough processes and improvements now pigeonholed and awaiting application to bring the physical side of life to almost millennial completeness. But we are too wrapped up in the things we are doing—we are not enough concerned with the reasons why we do them. Our whole competitive system, our whole creative expression, all the play of our faculties seem to be centred around material production and its by-products of success and wealth.

 

There is, for instance, a feeling that personal or group benefit can be had at the expense of other persons or groups. There is nothing to be gained by crushing any one. If the farmer’s bloc should crush the manufacturers would the farmers be better off? If the manufacturer’s bloc should crush the farmers, would the manufacturers be better off?

Could Capital gain by crushing Labour? Or Labour by crushing Capital? Or does a man in business gain by crushing a competitor? No, destructive competition benefits no one. The kind of competition which results in the defeat of the many and the overlordship of the ruthless few must go.

Destructive competition lacks the qualities out of which progress comes.

Progress comes from a generous form of rivalry. Bad competition is personal. It works for the aggrandizement of some individual or group.

It is a sort of warfare. It is inspired by a desire to “get” someone. It is wholly selfish. That is to say, its motive is not pride in the product, nor a desire to excel in service, nor yet a wholesome ambition to approach to scientific methods of production. It is moved simply by the desire to crowd out others and monopolize the market for the sake of the money returns. That being accomplished, it always substitutes a product of inferior quality.

 

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Freeing ourselves from the petty sort of destructive competition frees us from many set notions. We are too closely tied to old methods and single, one-way uses. We need more mobility. We have been using certain things just one way, we have been sending certain goods through only one channel—and when that use is slack, or that channel is stopped, business stops, too, and all the sorry consequences of “depression” set in. Take corn, for example. There are millions upon millions of bushels of corn stored in the United States with no visible outlet. A certain amount of corn is used as food for man and beast, but not all of it. In pre-Prohibition days a certain amount of corn went into the making of liquor, which was not a very good use for good corn. But through a long course of years corn followed those two channels, and when one of them stopped the stocks of corn began to pile up. It is the money fiction that usually retards the movement of stocks, but even if money were plentiful we could not possibly consume the stores of food which we sometimes possess.

 

If foodstuffs become too plentiful to be consumed as food, why not find other uses for them? Why use corn only for hogs and distilleries? Why sit down and bemoan the terrible disaster that has befallen the corn market? Is there no use for corn besides the making of pork or the making of whisky? Surely there must be. There should be so many uses for corn that only the important uses could ever be fully served; there ought always be enough channels open to permit corn to be used without waste.

 

Once upon a time the farmers burned corn as fuel—corn was plentiful and coal was scarce. That was a crude way to dispose of corn, but it contained the germ of an idea. There is fuel in corn; oil and fuel alcohol are obtainable from corn, and it is high time that someone was opening up this new use so that the stored-up corn crops may be moved.

Why have only one string to our bow? Why not two? If one breaks, there is the other. If the hog business slackens, why should not the farmer turn his corn into tractor fuel?

 

We need more diversity all round. The four-track system everywhere would not be a bad idea. We have a single-track money system. It is a mighty fine system for those who own it. It is a perfect system for the interest-collecting, credit-controlling financiers who literally own the commodity called Money and who literally own the machinery by which money is made and used. Let them keep their system if they like it. But the people are finding out that it is a poor system for what we call “hard times” because it ties up the line and stops traffic. If there are special protections for the interests, there ought also to be special protections for the plain people. Diversity of outlet, of use, and of financial enablement, are the strongest defenses we can have against economic emergencies.

 

It is likewise with Labour. There surely ought to be flying squadrons of young men who would be available for emergency conditions in harvest field, mine, shop, or railroad. If the fires of a hundred industries threaten to go out for lack of coal, and one million men are menaced by unemployment, it would seem both good business and good humanity for a sufficient number of men to volunteer for the mines and the railroads.

There is always something to be done in this world, and only ourselves to do it. The whole world may be idle, and in the factory sense there may be “nothing to do.” There may be nothing to do in this place or that, but there is always something to do. It is this fact which should urge us to such an organization of ourselves that this “something to be done” may get done, and unemployment reduced to a minimum.

 

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Every advance begins in a small way and with the individual. The mass can be no better than the sum of the individuals. Advancement begins within the man himself; when he advances from half-interest to strength of purpose; when he advances from hesitancy to decisive directness; when he advances from immaturity to maturity of judgment; when he advances from apprenticeship to mastery; when he advances from a mere dilettante

at labour to a worker who finds a genuine joy in work; when he advances from an eye-server to one who can be entrusted to do his work without oversight and without prodding—why, then the world advances! The advance is not easy. We live in flabby times when men are being taught that everything ought to be easy. Work that amounts to anything will never be easy. And the higher you go in the scale of responsibility, the harder becomes the job. Ease has its place, of course. Every man who works ought to have sufficient leisure. The man who works hard should have his easy chair, his comfortable fireside, his pleasant surroundings. These are his by right. But no one deserves ease until after his work is done. It will never be possible to put upholstered ease into work. Some work is needlessly hard. It can be lightened by proper management. Every device ought to be employed to leave a man free to do a man’s work. Flesh and blood should not be made to bear burdens that steel can bear. But even when the best is done, work still remains work, and any man who puts himself into his job will feel that it is work.

 

And there cannot be much picking and choosing. The appointed task may be less than was expected. A man’s real work is not always what he would have chosen to do. A man’s real work is what he is chosen to do. Just now there are more menial jobs than there will be in the future; and as long as there are menial jobs, someone will have to do them; but there is no reason why a man should be penalized because his job is menial.

There is one thing that can be said about menial jobs that cannot be said about a great many so-called more responsible jobs, and