My Life and Work
the same number of men per car that we did when we began in 1903--and
those men were only for assembly--we should to-day require a force of
more than two hundred thousand. We have less than fifty thousand men on
automobile production at our highest point of around four thousand cars
a day!
CHAPTER VI
MACHINES AND MEN
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.
When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought
to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two. The sole object
ought to be to get the work done and to get paid for it. When the work
is done, then the play can come, but not before. And so the Ford
factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties
attaching to any position, 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. The straw boss is responsible for
the workmen under him. The foreman is responsible for his group. The
department head is responsible for the department. The general
superintendent is responsible for the whole factory. Every man has to
know what is going on in his sphere. I say "general superintendent."
There is no such formal title. One man is in charge of the factory and
has been for years. He has two men with him, who, without in any way
having their duties defined, have taken particular sections of the work
to themselves. With them are about half a dozen other men in the nature
of assistants, but without specific duties. They have all made jobs for
themselves--but there are no limits to their jobs. They just work in
where they best fit. One man chases stock and shortages. Another has
grabbed inspection, and so on.
This may seem haphazard, but it is not. 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 labour 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 work and the work alone controls us. That is one of the reasons why
we have no titles. Most men can swing a job, but they are floored by a
title. The effect of a title is very peculiar. It has been used too much
as a sign of emancipation from work. It is almost equivalent to a badge
bearing the legend:
"This man has nothing to do but regard himself as important and all
others as inferior."
Not only is a title often injurious to the wearer, but it has its effect
on others as well. There is perhaps no greater single source of personal
dissatisfaction among men than the fact that the title-bearers are not
always the real leaders. Everybody acknowledges a real leader--a man who
is fit to plan and command. And when you find a real leader who bears a
title, you will have to inquire of someone else what his title is. He
doesn't boast about it.
Titles in business have been greatly overdone and business has suffered.
One of the bad features is the division of responsibility according to
titles, which goes so far as to amount to a removal altogether of
responsibility. Where responsibility is broken up into many small bits
and divided among many departments, each department under its own
titular head, who in turn is surrounded by a group bearing their nice
sub-titles, it is difficult to find any one who really feels
responsible. 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. Railroads have gone to the devil under the eyes of departments that
say:
"Oh, that doesn't come under our department. Department X, 100 miles
away, has that in charge."
There used to be a lot of advice given to officials not to hide behind
their titles. The very necessity for the advice showed a condition that
needed more than advice to correct it. And the correction is just
this--abolish the titles. A few may be legally necessary; a few may be
useful in directing the public how to do business with the concern, but
for the rest the best rule is simple: "Get rid of them."
As a matter of fact, the record of business in general just now is such
as to detract very much from the value of titles. No one would boast of
being president of a bankrupt bank. Business on the whole has not been
so skillfully steered as to leave much margin for pride in the
steersmen. The men who bear titles now and are worth anything are
forgetting their titles and are down in the foundation of business
looking for the weak spots. They are back again in the places from which
they rose--trying to reconstruct from the bottom up. And when a man is
really at work, he needs no title. His work honours him.
All of our people come into the factory or the offices through the
employment departments. As I have said, we do not hire experts--neither
do we hire men on past experiences or for any position other than the
lowest. Since we do not take a man on his past history, we do not refuse
him because of his past history. I never met a man who was thoroughly
bad. There is always some good in him--if he gets a chance. That is the
reason we do not care in the least about a man's antecedents--we do not
hire a man's history, we hire the man. If he has been in jail, that is
no reason to say that he will be in jail again. I think, on the
contrary, he is, if given a chance, very likely to make a special effort
to keep out of jail. Our employment office does not bar a man for
anything he has previously done--he is equally acceptable whether he has
been in Sing Sing or at Harvard and we do not even inquire from which
place he has graduated. All that he needs is the desire to work. If he
does not desire to work, it is very unlikely that he will apply for a
position, for it is pretty well understood that a man in the Ford plant
works.
We do not, to repeat, care what a man has been. If he has gone to
college he ought to be able to go ahead faster, but he has to start at
the bottom and prove his ability. Every man's future rests solely with
himself. There is far too much loose talk about men being unable to
obtain recognition. With us every man is fairly certain to get the exact
recognition he deserves.
Of course, there are certain factors in the desire for recognition which
must be reckoned with. The whole modern industrial system has warped the
desire so out of shape that it is now almost an obsession. 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. The job in hand--the
article in hand, the special kind of service in hand--turns out to be
not the principal job. The main work becomes personal advancement--a
platform from which to catch somebody's eye. This habit of making the
work secondary and the recognition primary is unfair to the work. It
makes recognition and credit the real job. And this also has an
unfortunate effect on the worker. It encourages a peculiar kind of
ambition which is neither lovely nor productive. It produces the kind of
man who imagines that by "standing in with the boss" he will get ahead.
Every shop knows this kind of man. And the worst of it is there are some
things in the present industrial system which make it appear that the
game really pays. Foremen are only human. It is natural that they should
be flattered by being made to believe that they hold the weal or woe of
workmen in their hands. It is natural, also, that being open to
flattery, their self-seeking subordinates should flatter them still more
to obtain and profit by their favor. That is why I want as little as
possible of the personal element.