Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.
When I can't handle events, I let them handle themselves.
If there is any one secret to success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from his angle as well as yours.
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do.
It is not the employer who pays wages. He only handles the money. It is the product that pays the wages and it is the management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages.
Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.
It has been my observation that most people get ahead during the time that others waste.
Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
There was a time when a man's personal advancement depended entirely and immediately upon his work, and not upon any one's favor; but nowadays it often depends far too much upon the individual's good fortune in catching some influential eye. That is what we have successfully fought against. Men will work with the idea of catching somebody's eye; they will work with the idea that if they fail to get credit for what they have done, they might as well have done it badly or not have done it at all. Thus the work sometimes becomes a secondary consideration.
You are not “saving” when you prevent yourself from becoming more productive. You are really taking away from your ultimate capital; you are taking away the value of one of nature's investments.
I have no quarrel with the general attitude of scoffing at new ideas. It is better to be skeptical of all new ideas and to insist upon being shown rather than to rush around in a continuous brainstorm after every new idea. Skepticism, if by that we mean cautiousness, is the balance wheel of civilization. Most of the present acute troubles of the world arise out of taking on new ideas without first carefully investigating to discover if they are good ideas.
An idea is not necessarily good because it is old, or necessarily bad because it is new, but if an old idea works, then the weight of the evidence is all in its favor. Ideas are of themselves extraordinarily valuable, but an idea is just an idea.
Some business men are too lazy to get into overalls and go down to see what is the matter. Or they are too proud to permit the thought that anything they have originated could go wrong. But the laws of business are like the law of gravity, and the man who opposes them feels their power.
In order to earn the proper profit on our narrow margin we must have a rapid turnover. We make cars to sell, not to store, and a month's unsold production would turn into a sum the interest on which alone would be enormous. The production is planned a year ahead and the number of cars to be made in each month of the year is scheduled, for of course it is a big problem to have the raw materials and such parts as we still buy from the outside flowing in consonance with production. We can no more afford to carry large stocks of finished than we can of raw material. Everything has to move in and move out.
There are many kinds of knowledge, and it depends on what crowd you happen to be in, or how the fashions of the day happen to run, which kind of knowledge, is most respected at the moment. There are fashions in knowledge, just as there are in everything else.
… Although one hears a great deal about the lack of opportunity for advancement, the average workman is more interested in a steady job than he is in advancement. Scarcely more than five percent of those who work for wages, while they have the desire to receive more money, have also the willingness to accept the additional responsibility and the additional work which goes with the higher places. ...The vast majority of men want to stay put. They want to be led. They want to have everything done for them and to have no responsibility.
Repetitive labor--the doing of one thing over and over again and always in the same way--is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind. It is terrifying to me. I could not possibly do the same thing day in and day out, but to other minds, perhaps I might say to the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.
We shift men whenever they ask to be shifted and we should like regularly to change them--that would be entirely feasible if only the men would have it that way. They do not like changes which they do not themselves suggest. Some of the operations are undoubtedly monotonous--so monotonous that it seems scarcely possible that any man would care to continue long at the same job. Probably the most monotonous task in the whole factory is one in which a man picks up a gear with a steel hook, shakes it in a vat of oil, then turns it into a basket. The motion never varies. The gears come to him always in exactly the same place, he gives each one the same number of shakes, and he drops it into a basket which is always in the same place. No muscular energy is required, no intelligence is required. He does little more than wave his hands gently to and fro--the steel rod is so light. Yet the man on that job has been doing it for eight solid years. He has saved and invested his money until now he has about forty thousand dollars--and he stubbornly resists every attempt to force him into a better job!
A Somewhat Conflicting Account
… [I have noticed by men] a great love for regularity. Men fall into the half-alive habit. Seldom does the cobbler take up with the new-fangled way of soling shoes, and seldom does the artisan willingly take up with new methods in his trade. Habit conduces to a certain inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble. It will be recalled that when a study was made of shop methods, so that the workmen might be taught to produce with less useless motion and fatigue, it was most opposed by the workmen themselves. Though they suspected that it was simply a game to get more out of them, what most irked them was that it interfered with the well-worn grooves in which they had become accustomed to move.
When a man is taken on by the Employment Department, the theory is to put him into a job suited to his condition. If he is already at work and he does not seem able to perform the work, or if he does not like his work, he is given a transfer card, which he takes up to the transfer department, and after an examination he is tried out in some other work more suited to his condition or disposition.
We expect the men to do what they are told. The organization is so highly specialized and one part is so dependent upon another that we could not for a moment consider allowing men to have their own way. Without the most rigid discipline we would have the utmost confusion.
One point that is absolutely essential to high capacity, as well as to humane production, is a clean, well-lighted and well-ventilated factory.
If an employer urges men to do their best, and the men learn after a while that their best does not bring any reward, then they naturally drop back into “getting by.” But if they see the fruits of hard work in their pay envelope--proof that harder work means higher pay--then also they begin to learn that they are a part of the business, and that its success depends on them and their success depends on it.
Work is our sanity, our self-respect, our salvation. So far from being a curse, work is the greatest blessing.
A manufacturer is not through with his customer when a sale is completed. He has then only started with his customer.
In the case of an automobile the sale of the machine is only something in the nature of an introduction. If the machine does not give service, then it is better for the manufacturer if he never had the introduction, for he will have the worst of all advertisements--a dissatisfied customer.
There was something more than a tendency in the early days of the automobile to regard the selling of a machine as the real accomplishment and that thereafter it did not matter what happened to the buyer. That is the shortsighted salesman-on-commission attitude. …
In the success of the Ford car the early provision of service was an outstanding element. Most of the expensive cars of that period were ill provided with service stations. If your car broke down you had to depend on the local repairman--when you were entitled to depend upon the manufacturer. If the local repair man were a forehanded sort of a person, keeping on hand a good stock of parts (although on many of the cars the parts were not interchangeable), the owner was lucky. But if the repair man were a shiftless person, with an adequate knowledge of automobiles and an inordinate desire to make a good thing out of every car that came into his place for repairs, then even a slight breakdown meant weeks of laying up and a whopping big repair bill that had to be paid before the car could be taken away. The repairmen were for a time the largest menace to the automobile industry.
The first step forward in assembly came when we began taking the work to the men instead of the men to the work. We now have two general principles in all operations--that a man shall never have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no man need ever stoop over.
We had previously assembled the fly-wheel magneto in the usual method. With one workman doing a complete job he could turn out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or about twenty minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into twenty-nine operations; that cut down the assembly time to thirteen minutes, ten seconds. Then we raised the height of the line eight inches--this was in 1914--and cut the time to seven minutes. Further experimenting with the speed that the work should move at cut the time down to five minutes.
In short, the result is this: by the aid of scientific study one man is now able to do somewhat more than four did only a comparatively few years ago.
Everyone knows what “passing the buck” means. The game must have originated in industrial organizations where the departments simply shove responsibility along. The health of every organization depends on every member--whatever his place--feeling that everything that happens to come to his notice relating to the welfare of the business is his own job.
That pressing always to do work better and faster solves nearly every factory problem. A department gets its standing on its rate of production. The rate of production and the cost of production are distinct elements. The foremen and superintendents would only be wasting time were they to keep a check on the costs in their departments. There are certain costs--such as the rate of wages, the overhead, the price of materials, and the like, which they could not in any way control, so they do not bother about them. What they can control is the rate of production in their own departments. …
The foreman need not be a cost accountant--he is no better a foreman for being one. His charges are the machines and the human beings in his department. When they are working at their best he has performed his service. The rate of his production is his guide. There is no reason for him to scatter his energies over collateral subjects. …
If he should select the people he likes instead of the people who can best do the work, his department record will quickly show up that fact.
The whole factory management is always open to suggestion, and we have an informal suggestion system by which any workman can communicate any idea that comes to him and get action on it.
That which one has to fight hardest against in bringing together a large number of people to do work is excess organization and consequent red tape. To my mind there is no bent of mind more dangerous than that which is sometimes described as the “genius for organization.” This usually results in the birth of a great big chart showing, after the fashion of a family tree, how authority ramifies. The tree is heavy with nice round berries, each of which bears the name of a man or of an office. Every man has a title and certain duties which are strictly limited by the circumference of his berry.
If a straw boss wants to say something to the general superintendent, his message has to go through the sub-foreman, the foreman, the department head, and all the assistant superintendents, before, in the course of time, it reaches the general superintendent. Probably by that time what he wanted to talk about is already history. It takes about six weeks for the message of a man living in a berry on the lower left-hand corner of the chart to reach the president or chairman of the board, and if it ever does reach one of these august officials, it has by that time gathered to itself about a pound of criticisms, suggestions, and comments. Very few things are ever taken under “official consideration” until long after the time when they actually ought to have been done.
The buck is passed to and fro and all responsibility is dodged by individuals--following the lazy notion that two heads are better than one.
Now a business, in my way of thinking, is not a machine. It is a collection of people who are brought together to do work and not to write letters to one another. It is not necessary for any one department to know what any other department is doing. If a man is doing his work he will not have time to take up any other work. It is the business of those who plan the entire work to see that all of the departments are working properly toward the same end. It is not necessary to have meetings to establish good feeling between individuals or departments. It is not necessary for people to love each other in order to work together. Too much good fellowship may indeed be a very bad thing, for it may lead to one man trying to cover up the faults of another. That is bad for both men.
… The Ford factories and enterprises have … no line of succession or of authority, very few titles, and no conferences. We have only the clerical help that is absolutely required; we have no elaborate records of any kind, and consequently no red tape.
We make the individual responsibility complete. The workman is absolutely responsible for his work. …
A group of men, wholly intent upon getting work done, have no difficulty in seeing that the work is done. They do not get into trouble about the limits of authority, because they are not thinking of titles. If they had offices and all that, they would shortly be giving up their time to office work and to wondering why did they not have a better office than some other fellow. Because there are no titles and no limits of authority, there is no question of red tape or going over a man's head. Any workman can go to anybody, and so established has become this custom, that a foreman does not get sore if a workman goes over him and directly to the head of the factory. The workman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman.
One of the things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a man starts to swell with authority he is discovered, and he goes out, or goes back to a machine. A large amount of labor unrest comes from the unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions, and I am afraid that in far too many manufacturing institutions it is really not possible for a workman to get a square deal.
The suggestions come from everywhere. The Polish workmen seem to be the cleverest of all of the foreigners in making them. One, who could not speak English, indicated that if the tool in his machine were set at a different angle it might wear longer. As it was it lasted only four or five cuts. He was right, and a lot of money was saved in grinding. Another Pole, running a drill press, rigged up a little fixture to save handling the part after drilling. That was adopted generally and a considerable saving resulted. The men often try out little attachments of their own because, concentrating on one thing, they can, if they have a mind that way, usually devise some improvement. …
Here are some of the suggestions: A proposal that castings be taken from the foundry to the machine shop on an overhead conveyor saved seventy men in the transport division. There used to be seventeen men--and this was when production was smaller--taking the burrs off gears, and it was a hard, nasty job. A man roughly sketched a special machine. His idea was worked out and the machine built. Now four men have several times the output of the seventeen men--and have no hard work at all to do. Changing from a solid to a welded rod in one part of the chassis effected an immediate saving of about one half million a year on a smaller than the present-day production. Making certain tubes out of flat sheets instead of drawing them in the usual way effected another enormous saving.
The old method of making a certain gear comprised four operations and 12 percent of the steel went into scrap. We use most of our scrap and eventually we will use it all, but that is no reason for not cutting down on scrap--the mere fact that all waste is not a dead loss is no excuse for permitting waste. One of the workmen devised a very simple new method for making this gear in which the scrap was only one percent. Again, the camshaft has to have heat treatment in order to make the surface hard; the cam shafts always came out of the heat-treat oven somewhat warped, and even back in 1918, we employed 37 men just to straighten the shafts. Several of our men experimented for about a year and finally worked out a new form of oven in which the shafts could not warp. In 1921, with the production much larger than in 1918, we employed only eight men in the whole operation.
And then there is the pressing to take away the necessity for skill in any job done by any one. The old-time tool hardener was an expert. He had to judge the heating temperatures. It was a hit-or-miss operation. The wonder is that he hit so often. The heat treatment in the hardening of steel is highly important--providing one knows exactly the right heat to apply. That cannot be known by rule-of-thumb. It has to be measured. We introduced a system by which the man at the furnace has nothing at all to do with the heat. He does not see the pyrometer--the instrument which registers the temperature. Colored electric lights give him his signals.
None of our machines is ever built haphazardly. The idea is investigated in detail before a move is made. Sometimes wooden models are constructed or again the parts are drawn to full size on a blackboard. We are not bound by precedent but we leave nothing to luck, and we have yet to build a machine that will not do the work for which it was designed. About ninety percent of all experiments have been successful.
Whatever expertness in fabrication that has developed has been due to men. I think that if men are unhampered and they know that they are serving, they will always put all of mind and will into even the most trivial of tasks.
We do not have piece work. Some of the men are paid by the day and some are paid by the hour, but in practically every case there is a required standard output below which a man is not expected to fall. Were it otherwise, neither the workman nor ourselves would know whether or not wages were being earned. There must be a fixed day's work before a real wage can be paid. Watchmen are paid for presence. Workmen are paid for work.
Having these facts in hand we announced and put into operation in January, 1914, a kind of profit-sharing plan in which the minimum wage for any class of work and under certain conditions was five dollars a day. At the same time we reduced the working day to eight hours--it had been nine--and the week to forty-eight hours. This was entirely a voluntary act. All of our wage rates have been voluntary. It was to our way of thinking an act of social justice, and in the last analysis we did it for our own satisfaction of mind. There is a pleasure in feeling that you have made others happy--that you have lessened in some degree the burdens of your fellow-men--that you have provided a margin out of which may be had pleasure and saving. Good-will is one of the few really important assets of life. A determined man can win almost anything that he goes after, but unless, in his getting, he gains good will he has not profited much.
There was, however, no charity in any way involved. That was not generally understood. Many employers thought we were just making the announcement because we were prosperous and wanted advertising and they condemned us because we were upsetting standards--violating the custom of paying a man the smallest amount he would take. There is nothing to such standards and customs. They have to be wiped out. Some day they will be. Otherwise, we cannot abolish poverty. We made the change not merely because we wanted to pay higher wages and thought we could pay them. We wanted to pay these wages so that the business would be on a lasting foundation. We were not distributing anything--we were building for the future. A low wage business is always insecure.
Probably few industrial announcements have created a more world-wide comment than did this one, and hardly any one got the facts quite right. Workmen quite generally believed that they were going to get five dollars a day, regardless of what work they did.
The facts were somewhat different from the general impression. The plan was to distribute profits, but instead of waiting until the profits had been earned--to approximate them in advance and to add them, under certain conditions, to the wages of those persons who had been in the employ of the company for six months or more. …