My Life and Work
members are bent on the one main purpose--to get along toward the
objective. A common purpose, honestly believed in, sincerely
desired--that is the great harmonizing principle.
I pity the poor fellow who is so soft and flabby that he must always
have "an atmosphere of good feeling" around him before he can do his
work. There are such men. And in the end, unless they obtain enough
mental and moral hardiness to lift them out of their soft reliance on
"feeling," they are failures. Not only are they business failures; they
are character failures also; it is as if their bones never attained a
sufficient degree of hardness to enable them to stand on their own feet.
There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business
organizations. People have too great a fondness for working with the
people they like. In the end it spoils a good many valuable qualities.
Do not misunderstand me; when I use the term "good feeling" I mean that
habit of making one's personal likes and dislikes the sole standard of
judgment. Suppose you do not like a man. Is that anything against him?
It may be something against you. What have your likes or dislikes to do
with the facts? Every man of common sense knows that there are men whom
he dislikes, who are really more capable than he is himself.
And taking all this out of the shop and into the broader fields, it is
not necessary for the rich to love the poor or the poor to love the
rich. It is not necessary for the employer to love the employee or for
the employee to love the employer. What is necessary is that each should
try to do justice to the other according to his deserts. That is real
democracy and not the question of who ought to own the bricks and the
mortar and the furnaces and the mills. And democracy has nothing to do
with the question, "Who ought to be boss?"
That is very much like asking: "Who ought to be the tenor in the
quartet?" Obviously, the man who can sing tenor. You could not have
deposed Caruso. Suppose some theory of musical democracy had consigned
Caruso to the musical proletariat. Would that have reared another tenor
to take his place? Or would Caruso's gifts have still remained his own?
CHAPTER XIX
WHAT WE MAY EXPECT
We are--unless I do not read the signs aright--in the midst of a change.
It is going on all about us, slowly and scarcely observed, but with a
firm surety. We are gradually learning to relate cause and effect. A
great deal of that which we call disturbance--a great deal of the upset
in what have seemed to be established institutions--is really but the
surface indication of something approaching a regeneration. The public
point of view is changing, and we really need only a somewhat different
point of view to make the very bad system of the past into a very good
system of the future. We are displacing that peculiar virtue which used
to be admired as hard-headedness, and which was really only
wooden-headedness, with intelligence, and also we are getting rid of
mushy sentimentalism. The first confused hardness with progress; the
second confused softness with progress. We are getting a better view of
the realities and are beginning to know that we have already in the
world all things needful for the fullest kind of a life and that we
shall use them better once we learn what they are and what they mean.
Whatever is wrong--and we all know that much is wrong--can be righted by
a clear definition of the wrongness. We have been looking so much at one
another, at what one has and another lacks, that we have made a personal
affair out of something that is too big for personalities. To be sure,
human nature enters largely into our economic problems. Selfishness
exists, and doubtless it colours all the competitive activities of life.
If selfishness were the characteristic of any one class it might be
easily dealt with, but it is in human fibre everywhere. And greed
exists. And envy exists. And jealousy exists.
But as the struggle for mere existence grows less--and it is less than
it used to be, although the sense of uncertainty may have increased--we
have an opportunity to release some of the finer motives. We think less
of the frills of civilization as we grow used to them. Progress, as the
world has thus far known it, is accompanied by a great increase in the
things of life. There is more gear, more wrought material, in the
average American backyard than in the whole domain of an African king.
The average American boy has more paraphernalia around him than a whole
Eskimo community. The utensils of kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and
coal cellar make a list that would have staggered the most luxurious
potentate of five hundred years ago. The increase in the impedimenta of
life only marks a stage. We are like the Indian who comes into town with
all his money and buys everything he sees. There is no adequate
realization of the large proportion of the labour and material of
industry that is used in furnishing the world with its trumpery and
trinkets, which are made only to be sold, and are bought merely to be
owned--that perform no service in the world and are at last mere rubbish
as at first they were mere waste. Humanity is advancing out of its
trinket-making stage, and industry is coming down to meet the world's
needs, and thus we may expect further advancement toward that life which
many now see, but which the present "good enough" stage hinders our
attaining.
And we are growing out of this worship of material possessions. It is no
longer a distinction to be rich. As a matter of fact, to be rich is no
longer a common ambition. People do not care for money as money, as they
once did. Certainly they do not stand in awe of it, nor of him who
possesses it. What we accumulate by way of useless surplus does us no
honour.
It takes only a moment's thought to see that as far as individual
personal advantage is concerned, vast accumulations of money mean
nothing. A human being is a human being and is nourished by the same
amount and quality of food, is warmed by the same weight of clothing,
whether he be rich or poor. And no one can inhabit more than one room at
a time.
But if one has visions of service, if one has vast plans which no
ordinary resources could possibly realize, if one has a life ambition to
make the industrial desert bloom like the rose, and the work-a-day life
suddenly blossom into fresh and enthusiastic human motives of higher
character and efficiency, then one sees in large sums of money what the
farmer sees in his seed corn--the beginning of new and richer harvests
whose benefits can no more be selfishly confined than can the sun's
rays.
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 ills will
be cured. They are both on the wrong track. They might as well try to
corner all the checkers or all the dominoes of the world under the
delusion that they are thereby cornering great quantities of skill. Some
of the most successful money-makers of our times have never added one
pennyworth to the wealth of men. Does a card player add to the wealth of
the world?
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. Any real scarcity of the
necessaries of life in the world--not a fictitious scarcity caused by
the lack of clinking metallic disks in one's purse--is due only to lack
of production. And lack of production is due only too often to lack of
knowledge of how and what to produce.
* * * * *
This much we must believe as a starting point:
That the earth produces, or is capable of producing, enough to give
decent sustenance to everyone--not of food alone, but of everything else
we need. For everything is produced from the earth.
That it is possible for labour, production, distribution, and reward to
be so organized as to make certain that those who contribute shall
receive shares determined by an exact justice.
That regardless of the frailties of human nature, our economic system
can be so adjusted that selfishness, although perhaps not abolished, can
be robbed of power to work serious economic injustice.
* * * * *
The business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack
of skill displayed in production and distribution. It has been thought
that business existed for profit. That is wrong. Business exists for
service. It is a profession, and must have recognized professional
ethics, to violate which declasses a man. Business needs more of the
professional spirit. The professional spirit seeks professional
integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The professional spirit
detects its own violations and penalizes them. Business will some day
become clean. A machine that stops every little while is an imperfect
machine, and its imperfection is within itself. A body that falls sick
every little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself.
So with business. Its faults, many of them purely the faults of the
moral constitution of business, clog its progress and make it sick every
little while. Some day the ethics of business will be universally
recognized, and in that day business will be seen to be the oldest and
most useful of all the professions.
* * * * *
All that the Ford industries have done--all that I have done--is to
endeavour to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that
the sort of business which makes the world better for its presence is a
noble profession. Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the
somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises--I will not say
"success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting--is due
to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well
enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and
would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any
products or personalities other than our own.
It used to be taken for granted that our theories and our methods were
fundamentally unsound. That is because they were not understood. Events
have killed that kind of comment, but there remains a wholly sincere
belief that what we have done could not be done by any other
company--that we have been touched by a wand, that neither we nor any
one else could make shoes, or hats, or sewing machines, or watches, or
typewriters, or any other necessity after the manner in which we make
automobiles and tractors. And that if only we ventured into other fields
we should right quickly discover our errors. I do not agree with any of
this. Nothing has come out of the air. The foregoing pages should prove
that. We have nothing that others might not have. We have had no good
fortune except that which always attends any one who puts his best into
his work. There was nothing that could be called "favorable" about our
beginning. We began with almost nothing. What we have, we earned, and we
earned it by unremitting labour and faith in a principle. We took what
was a luxury and turned it into a necessity and without trick or
subterfuge. When we began to make our present motor car the country had
few good roads, gasoline was scarce, and the idea was firmly implanted
in the public mind that an automobile was at the best a rich man's toy.
Our only advantage was lack of precedent.
We began to manufacture according to a creed--a creed which was at that