May Ling's Reviews > My Life And Work

Summary: Must read. It's often quoted, but without having read this, you can only but have these intense words of wisdom out of context. Ford was a genius and he would have been a success even today. Wow. This is a top 5 book for 2019 for me.

P. 8 - He talks about work being the natural order of things and that to move against it will cause angst. He just thinks that if we're going to do it, we ought to do it cleverly. He then says: "I am not a reformer. I think there is entirely too much attempt at reforming in the world and that we pay too much attention to reformers. We have two kinds of reformers. Both are nuisances." He then talks about the type of person that would smash a button because the butthole is too small, rather than just fix the size of the hole. From here he talks about the difference between a business person vs. a reformer.

He is so ahead of all those that might describe business as the act of solving problems. Brilliant.

p.10 - He talks about how the man who works with his hands is often at odds with the man who works with his brain. He sites the Bolshevik revolution who threw out everyone with a brain only to realize they can't do much with more IQ points. He sees these "reformers" as a sort of evil as they try to drive discontent between those who work with their brains vs. their hands. As relates to the two types of reformers then:
"The one crowd wants to smash up the whole world to make a better one Th other holds the world as so good that it might well be let stand as it is - and decay. The second notion arises as does the first - out of not using the eyes to see with. It is perfectly possible to smash this world, but it is not possible to build a new one. It is possible to prevent the world from going forward, but it is not possible to prevent it from going back - from decaying." His point is the world is either in a forward or backward motion.

p. 11 - "Speculation in things already produced - that is not business. It is just more or less respectable graft. But it cannot be legislated out of existence." He is very anti-gov, but his way of talking about it is a bit more clear than others as it predates a lot of the crazy structures that are now our US gov.

p. 16 - This is so relevant in this current period of nonsense within private equity - "It is the function of business to produce for consumption and not for money or speculation. Producing for consumption implies that the quality of the article produced will be high and that the price will be low - that the article be one which serves the people, and not merely the producer."
This whole concept of customer-centric was all Ford's way of thinking.

p. .17 - "An it is absolutely necessary to have money. But we do not want to forget that the end of money is not ease but the opportunity to perform more service." He's super against a life of ease. I have mixed feelings about this. I think in modern times you can do what you love as long as you apply yourself. Still, I think that he's likely right for the most part.

p. 18 - I just thought this quote is funny (albeit I'm taking it out of context). "I think that dress reform for women - which seems to mean ugly clothes - must always originate with plain women who want to make everyone else look plain."

p.20 - This flies in the face of what a lot of start-ups are doing. But I tend to agree. He talks about businesses that start with no knowledge of how to produce or market. He says these incremental improvements really never end up being good businesses. He'd rather people not do much until they really know what it is they are actually doing. It's kind of brilliant. I've totally struggled with helping start-ups that get too much of overly nonsensical pivot advice at the expense of really producing something (an MVP and then trying to market it).

p.21 - He talks about how they go about what we now call innovation and how others do it incorrectly. I'm paraphrasing, but in today's words, they test out MVPs and then figure out how to improve manufacturing once they prove it's a good product. There is nothing incremental about it.

p. 21-23, These pages are key for my research. The idea is that Ford knew that every single aspect of his work would change, from the raw materials to the tools (which he himself was building when it made sense). there was no consideration that things would be stable. "Our big changes have been in methods of manufacturing. They never standstill." I believe that there is hardly a single operation in the making of our car that is the same as when we made our first car of the present model. That is why we make them so cheaply."

p. 23 - "I have striven toward manufacturing with a minimum of waste, both materials and of human effort, and then toward distribution at a minimum of profit, depending on the total profit upon the volume of distribution." He pays the most he can given these constraints. He has 3 principals:
1) An absence of fear of the future and of the veneration for the past.
2) A disregard of competition.
3) The putting of service before profit.
4) Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high... Profit must and inevitably will come as ar reward for good service.

The last one people have said so often, but they focus WAY too much on service. It's a balance. You create quality because the quality is the point. It has embedded within it service. Not this crazy nonsense I keep hearing spewed by people with no experience. You have to actually add value.

p. 38 - Ford had to choose between staying at Edison or his car biz. He chose the car biz and quit on August 15, 1899. I think it's interesting that he was 36 years old. He had experience. When you think about how old Jeff Bezos is and you think about everyone in today's age that is so much younger. It's just fascinating.

p.49 - As he thinks about the bankers that come in try to run his biz:
1) That finance is given a place ahead of work and therefore tends to kill the work and destroy the fundamental of service
2) That thinking first of money instead of work brings on fear of failure and this fear blocks every avenue of business -- it makes a man afraid of competition, of changing his methods, or of doing anything which might change his condition.
3) That the way is clear for anyone who thinks first of service - of doing the work in the best possible way.

P. 51 - He goes on a rant about standardizing. His point is the highest quality at the lowest possible price is what you should be providing but people think of this as standardization and they are WRONG. Standardizing implies "The freezing of design and method and usually works out so that the manufacturer selects whatever article he can the most easily make and sell at the highest profit. The public is not considered either in the design or in the price." There's a bunch more and he thinks it's folly.

p. 59 - at first he had to use the materials that were offered. Later he describes in subsequent pages the types of machines he created and how they saved a lot of money.

P. 76-77 The way he thought about good cars are:
1) Quality in material to give service in use.
2) Simplicity in operation.
This was super controversial.

p. 81 - "It is self-evident that a majority of the people in the world are not mentally - even if they are physically - capable of making a good living." His point is that we are dependent on each other. And also, there is no need to be mean to people that make a living with their mind.

p. 83 - A Ford car contains about 5,000 parts - that is counting screws, nuts, and all.
p. 84 - he talks about the birth of the assembly line. The idea was to reduce the waste related to space and time.
p. 85 - he got the idea fro watching Chicago packers dressing beef.
p. 89 - he hates people that dwell on what "can't be done." as a result, he cares not about what someone's past is when hiring. He cares what they are capable of in the future. For that reason, he goes on to talk about how he's leering of experts.
p.95 - He doesn't trust work friends, b/c he thinks they cover up for each other at the expense of each other's capabilities and his firm.
p. 100 - He talks about growing your talent from within.
p. 106 - His thoughts on automation are brilliant. He saw the world as growing, so he did not see a reason to fear the loss of a job.
P. 110 he has a lot to say about hiring disabled men. remember he's speaking from the time of WW1 and trying to figure out how to help those that served. His point is to allow them to be profitable, don't put them in conditions to fail or be made to feel less than.
p. 113 - Wow... he kept stats on his employees like crazy. They had 9,563 "substandard men" who we would no deem those with physical disabilities. He truly enumerated everyone of them including epileptics. WOW! They stopped enumerating at one point, but I wish they hadn't. WOULD HAVE LOVED To go through those numbers. If ANYONE at Ford is reading this, please call me if you want this work done.
Actually this whole page is an HR dream. He talks about who took time off and how they did it and if they had to be fired because of it. There are also stats on women, which were only hired if their man did not have a job.
p.115 - talks about how to minimize politics and handle fights. It's crazy. I will have to revisit all of this at some point.

p. 121 - Again in this world of start-up private equity nonsense - "If men, instead of saying 'the employer ought to do thus-and-so would say, "the business ought to be so stimulated and managed that it can do thus-and-so," they would get somewhere. because only the business can pay wages. Certainly, the employer can not..."

p. .129 - the order of who ought to get paid is a bit sexist, but it's here and it was a point in time. Sadly, the world still works this way.

p. 131 - He talks about how Easy Money messes up the ability to have work. Easy money makes men lazy. And giving people too much money too early makes them lazy.

p. 149 He makes the point that if you can pay someone 6$ but make more or have them be more productive/lowers unit costs, but you only pay them that if that's true (i.e. it makes him less worried, more focused, etc).

p. 150 - You only standardize at the end. You do not start with standardization (design, etc). This is freakin brilliant actually. I need this for my book for sure.

p. 161 - He talks about how money is provided exactly at the wrong time for a lot of companies, i.e. when they need it and aren't able to make it. You should be trying to shore this up when you don't need it and when it's used for pure expansion. The rest you should just let fail and die.

p. 178 - "And that is the danger of having bankers in business. They think solely in terms of making money. They think of a factory as making money, not goods. They want to watch the money, not the efficiency of production. They cannot comprehend that a business never stands still, it must go forward or go back." He goes on... it's pretty brilliant.

p. 179 - "No financial system is good which favors one class of producers over another."

p. 182-184 - This whole discussion of his point of view of the gold standard. so brilliant. Will likely need to revisit.

p. 211 - "The charitable system that does not aim to make itself unnecessary is not performing service."

p. 212 - He talks about the use of prison laborers but in a way that is actually progressive to reforming people to have a livelihood after jail.

P. 213 - He talks about the failure to skill/educate as a burden on the state. We have so moved away from this.

p. 225 - this whole section is amazing if you're trying to understand the current ridiculousness of the the US Railway system.

p. 242 - He talks about how War is bad for business and the only businesses that benefit are doing so at the expense of the people in way the government should protect against. Sadly, he says the interests are not aligned to ever do that.

p. 257 - He's got an opinion about unions from that period. But this is still a great quote: "The only true labor leader is the one who leads labour to work and to wages, and not the leader who leads labor to strikes, sabotage, and starvation."

p. 269 - "There are two fools in this world. One is the millionaire who thinks that by hoarding money he can somehow accumulate real power, and the other is the penniless reformer who thinks that if only he can take the money from one class and give it to another, all the world's ill will be cured. They are both on the wrong track... If we all created wealth up to the limits, the easy limits, of our creative capacity, then it would simply be a case of there being enough for everybody, and everybody getting enough"
He then talks about the concept of abundance outside of money. That should be taken care of. the money is something different. (p. 272)

p. 279 "If the factory system which brought mediocrity up to a higher standard operated also to keep ability down to a lower standard - it would be a very bad system...
"More brains are needed to-day than ever before, although perhaps they are not needed in the same place as they once were."
He called this the mental power-plant.

It's just a seriously brilliant book. Wow. Love it. Top 5 for sure.