Vismay's Reviews > My Life And Work

** spoiler alert **
I have read books by writers with fanciful imagination. Finally, I got time enough to read one by the author who has always captured people’s fancy and imagination. His accomplishments have inspired many, and we can’t really do without his useful little contraption. A rigorous capitalist who wishes to do a service to his people, Henry Ford is indeed a man of many contradictions (or so it seems to the casual observer!).

I had My Life and Work for quite some time. But being a lazy reader who is continually being pampered and indulged by fiction writers, I had difficulty in going through it as not even a single fly was killed or a zit was popped by the end of first few pages. Hence the reading of the aforementioned book was deferred until this reader was possessed of sane judgement. If Mr. Ford was to read this review, he would remark angrily, ‘Stop being such a wuss.’ Time and again, I do make the right decisions and one of them was to once again pick up the book.

I have inherently believed that only a strongly opinionated man could achieve what he set out to do. Experience has given him an insight into the workings of the world, and he has a firm set of notions about how it works and what is needed to be done to change the status quo. With well-defined set-points and laws framed to govern one’s life, one can systematically find his way to ‘success’ (but Mr. Ford will shirk away from using that word as he considers it as an epitaph). You might not agree to all that Henry Ford has to say, but this is one Working Man’s manual you can’t do without.

The book is riddled with useful aphorisms. Sample this where he instructs the young to not be parsimonious:

Young men ought to invest rather than save. They ought to invest in themselves to increase creative value; after they have taken themselves to the peak of usefulness, then will be time enough of laying aside, as a fixed policy, a substantial share of income.

This one tells them to have patience:

…it is the fellow who can stand the gaff of routine and still keep himself alive and alert who finally gets into direction. It is not sensational brilliance that one seeks in business, but sound, substantial dependability. Big enterprises of necessity move slowly and cautiously. The young man with ambition ought to take a long look ahead and leave an ample margin of time for things to happen.

To inspire and to instruct happens to be his motto! The single most important message that Mr. Ford wishes to convey through this book is to do a business, keeping service to the society as the basic objective, not the profit. Though he believes that profit is essential for business to expand and surplus isn’t essentially evil, service to his fellow men is of prime importance to him. Yet his idea of service is different. According to him, service means to offer useful products to his customers at affordable prices and to ensure the well-being of his employees. It is not good management to make profits at the expense of worker’s wages or by exacting a large price from the customers by selling them inferior quality products, he believes in making “the management produce the profits”. Only one recourse to profit was provided, “Put brains into the method, and more brains, and still more brains – do things better than ever before; and by this means all parties to business are served and benefitted”.

At the same time, he didn’t believe in charity as that increased the non-productive costs of the company (he was blunt!) and created a society where “whole sections of our population were coddled into a state of expectant, childlike helplessness”. He feels that philanthropy should try to make charity unnecessary, by making people self-reliant. The business of philanthropy is to ensure that it soon goes out of business! To this end he established a training institute for the young and affordable hospital providing quality healthcare. Also, as a rule, he was against employing differently-abled people in jobs which didn’t utilize their 100 percent. He rigorously evaluated each type of job work that was being performed in his company, how much effort has to be put into a particular job, which faculties are to be used in executing that job, and identified areas where a blind or a crippled man can perform at his efficient best. Hence he didn’t employ them with a regard of doing charity for the society, he employed them as regular workers, who worked with dignity and got full-pay.

He was forever finding synergies between industry and farm. He advised his plant workers to go farm during the slump period, and provided non-seasonal employment to the farmers once the crops have been harvested. He constantly searched for ways and means to remove the drudgery out of farming with the use of machines. It was with this intention of making a farmer’s life easy that he set out in the business of making cars (and tractors!). Though he intended to remove the drudgery from work, he firmly believed that there was no substitute for hard work. Stop being so goddamn sentimental and work hard! He hated lazy people.

Yet at times, while reading the book, I felt exasperated. How can a person believe that business needs monopoly to counter bad capitalism?!

Sample this argument:

Whosoever 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 by intelligence.

Wouldn’t market forces take care of that? If a guy is producing good quality product at a cheaper rate, people would assuredly buy from him and the other guy would be forced to adapt or shut shop. Granted, he sounds convincing, when he argues like this:

..destructive competition lacks the qualities out of which the 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 a product, nor a desire to excel in service, nor a wholesome ambition to approach to scientific methods of production.

And though he appears to encourage “generous form of rivalry” in the above extract, it is my observation that throughout the book he considers all competition as BAD. There is nothing like a GOOD monopoly. The market needs to function freely, if providing better services at cheaper costs, is one’s motive!

The other thing which confuses me is his stand on financing. I totally agree when he says that when a business is having troubles, it mustn’t be financed from outside but must be restructured internally so as to weed out bad management decisions. I can even understand his aversion for evil, manipulative bankers, but he is against paying dividends to the stockholders! Though he has specifically mentioned that financing is perfectly valid when one goes for expansion, yet I find it difficult to digest that he refuses to pay dividends to the people who have invested in his company but expects them not to be driven by the money-aspect! Why would any person, invest in any company, if not to earn money? When it is your belief that the entire profit must be used to further your business and increase the purview of service you render and not pay any dividends to money-minded investors who couldn’t see the big picture, don’t take money from them in the first place!

He is also anti-immigration and anti-globalization. I won’t explicate my stand on these aspects as it would simply be brushed aside by the argument that I am Indian.

Yet indeed he was a great man. And this is a great book. I have written this review solely on the basis of the book, and I haven’t considered the man. I am indeed in awe with the person who brought about a dramatic change in society which initially thought that motor-vehicles were a luxury only within purview of the rich. He was a pioneer and a hard working man, an inventive genius with managerial acumen. Henry Ford is a person worth emulating and My Life and Work is indeed an SOP for every business.