Meriwether Lewis et al - "The Journals of Lewis and Clark"

Charles Dickens - "Pictures from Italy"

Carolyn Wells - "Patty's Suitors"

Anthony Trollope - "The Mistletoe Bough"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: My Life and Work

H >> Henry Ford >> My Life and Work




This is a development which holds exceptional consequences, for it
means, as I shall enlarge in a later chapter, that highly standardized,
highly subdivided industry need no longer become concentrated in large
plants with all the inconveniences of transportation and housing that
hamper large plants. A thousand or five hundred men ought to be enough
in a single factory; then there would be no problem of transporting them
to work or away from work and there would be no slums or any of the
other unnatural ways of living incident to the overcrowding that must
take place if the workmen are to live within reasonable distances of a
very large plant.

Highland Park now has five hundred departments. Down at our Piquette
plant we had only eighteen departments, and formerly at Highland Park we
had only one hundred and fifty departments. This illustrates how far we
are going in the manufacture of parts.

Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere in
machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is
called "the best shop practice." I recall that a machine manufacturer
was once called into conference on the building of a special machine.
The specifications called for an output of two hundred per hour.

"This is a mistake," said the manufacturer, "you mean two hundred a
day--no machine can be forced to two hundred an hour."

The company officer sent for the man who had designed the machine and
they called his attention to the specification. He said:

"Yes, what about it?"

"It can't be done," said the manufacturer positively, "no machine built
will do that--it is out of the question."

"Out of the question!" exclaimed the engineer, "if you will come down to
the main floor you will see one doing it; we built one to see if it
could be done and now we want more like it."

The factory keeps no record of experiments. The foremen and
superintendents remember what has been done. If a certain method has
formerly been tried and failed, somebody will remember it--but I am not
particularly anxious for the men to remember what someone else has tried
to do in the past, for then we might quickly accumulate far too many
things that could not be done. That is one of the troubles with
extensive records. If you keep on recording all of your failures you
will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing left for you to
try--whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed in a
certain method that another man will not succeed.

They told us we could not cast gray iron by our endless chain method and
I believe there is a record of failures. But we are doing it. The man
who carried through our work either did not know or paid no attention to
the previous figures. Likewise we were told that it was out of the
question to pour the hot iron directly from the blast furnace into
mould. The usual method is to run the iron into pigs, let them season
for a time, and then remelt them for casting. But at the River Rouge
plant we are casting directly from cupolas that are filled from the
blast furnaces. Then, too, a record of failures--particularly if it is a
dignified and well-authenticated record--deters a young man from trying.
We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels
fear to tread.

None of our men are "experts." We have most unfortunately found it
necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an
expert--because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows
his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has
done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant
of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead,
thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which
nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the "expert" state of
mind a great number of things become impossible.

I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover
that any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say
what is and what is not possible. The right kind of experience, the
right kind of technical training, ought to enlarge the mind and reduce
the number of impossibilities. It unfortunately does nothing of the
kind. Most technical training and the average of that which we call
experience, provide a record of previous failures and, instead of these
failures being taken for what they are worth, they are taken as absolute
bars to progress. If some man, calling himself an authority, says that
this or that cannot be done, then a horde of unthinking followers start
the chorus: "It can't be done."

Take castings. Castings has always been a wasteful process and is so old
that it has accumulated many traditions which make improvements
extraordinarily difficult to bring about. I believe one authority on
moulding declared--before we started our experiments--that any man who
said he could reduce costs within half a year wrote himself down as a
fraud.

Our foundry used to be much like other foundries. When we cast the first
"Model T" cylinders in 1910, everything in the place was done by hand;
shovels and wheelbarrows abounded. The work was then either skilled or
unskilled; we had moulders and we had labourers. Now we have about five
per cent. of thoroughly skilled moulders and core setters, but the
remaining 95 per cent. are unskilled, or to put it more accurately, must
be skilled in exactly one operation which the most stupid man can learn
within two days. The moulding is all done by machinery. Each part which
we have to cast has a unit or units of its own--according to the number
required in the plan of production. The machinery of the unit is adapted
to the single casting; thus the men in the unit each perform a single
operation that is always the same. A unit consists of an overhead
railway to which at intervals are hung little platforms for the moulds.
Without going into technical details, let me say the making of the
moulds and the cores, and the packing of the cores, are done with the
work in motion on the platforms. The metal is poured at another point as
the work moves, and by the time the mould in which the metal has been
poured reaches the terminal, it is cool enough to start on its automatic
way to cleaning, machining, and assembling. And the platform is moving
around for a new load.

Take the development of the piston-rod assembly. Even under the old
plan, this operation took only three minutes and did not seem to be one
to bother about. There were two benches and twenty-eight men in all;
they assembled one hundred seventy-five pistons and rods in a nine-hour
day--which means just five seconds over three minutes each. There was no
inspection, and many of the piston and rod assemblies came back from the
motor assembling line as defective. It is a very simple operation. The
workman pushed the pin out of the piston, oiled the pin, slipped the rod
in place, put the pin through the rod and piston, tightened one screw,
and opened another screw. That was the whole operation. The foreman,
examining the operation, could not discover why it should take as much
as three minutes. He analyzed the motions with a stop-watch. He found
that four hours out of a nine-hour day were spent in walking. The
assembler did not go off anywhere, but he had to shift his feet to
gather in his materials and to push away his finished piece. In the
whole task, each man performed six operations. The foreman devised a new
plan; he split the operation into three divisions, put a slide on the
bench and three men on each side of it, and an inspector at the end.
Instead of one man performing the whole operation, one man then
performed only one third of the operation--he performed only as much as
he could do without shifting his feet. They cut down the squad from
twenty-eight to fourteen men. The former record for twenty-eight men was
one hundred seventy-five assemblies a day. Now seven men turn out
twenty-six hundred assemblies in eight hours. It is not necessary to
calculate the savings there!

Painting the rear axle assembly once gave some trouble. It used to be
dipped by hand into a tank of enamel. This required several handlings
and the services of two men. Now one man takes care of it all on a
special machine, designed and built in the factory. The man now merely
hangs the assembly on a moving chain which carries it up over the enamel
tank, two levers then thrust thimbles over the ends of the ladle shaft,
the paint tank rises six feet, immerses the axle, returns to position,
and the axle goes on to the drying oven. The whole cycle of operations
now takes just thirteen seconds.

The radiator is a complex affair and soldering it used to be a matter of
skill. There are ninety-five tubes in a radiator. Fitting and soldering
these tubes in place is by hand a long operation, requiring both skill
and patience. Now it is all done by a machine which will make twelve
hundred radiator cores in eight hours; then they are soldered in place
by being carried through a furnace by a conveyor. No tinsmith work and
so no skill are required.

We used to rivet the crank-case arms to the crank-case, using pneumatic
hammers which were supposed to be the latest development. It took six
men to hold the hammers and six men to hold the casings, and the din was
terrific. Now an automatic press operated by one man, who does nothing
else, gets through five times as much work in a day as those twelve men
did.

In the Piquette plant the cylinder casting traveled four thousand feet
in the course of finishing; now it travels only slightly over three
hundred feet.

There is no manual handling of material. There is not a single hand
operation. If a machine can be made automatic, it is made automatic. Not
a single operation is ever considered as being done in the best or
cheapest way. At that, only about ten per cent. of our tools are
special; the others are regular machines adjusted to the particular job.
And they are placed almost side by side. We put more machinery per
square foot of floor space than any other factory in the world--every
foot of space not used carries an overhead expense. We want none of that
waste. Yet there is all the room needed--no man has too much room and no
man has too little room. Dividing and subdividing operations, keeping
the work in motion--those are the keynotes of production. But also it is
to be remembered that all the parts are designed so that they can be
most easily made. And the saving? Although the comparison is not quite
fair, it is startling. If at our present rate of production we employed
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.

It is particularly easy for any man who never knows it all to go forward
to a higher position with us. Some men will work hard but they do not
possess the capacity to think and especially to think quickly. Such men
get as far as their ability deserves. A man may, by his industry,
deserve advancement, but it cannot be possibly given him unless he also
has a certain element of leadership. This is not a dream world we are
living in. I think that every man in the shaking-down process of our
factory eventually lands about where he belongs.

We are never satisfied with the way that everything is done in any part
of the organization; we always think it ought to be done better and that
eventually it will be done better. The spirit of crowding forces the man
who has the qualities for a higher place eventually to get it. He
perhaps would not get the place if at any time the organization--which
is a word I do not like to use--became fixed, so that there would be
routine steps and dead men's shoes. But we have so few titles that a man
who ought to be doing something better than he is doing, very soon gets
to doing it--he is not restrained by the fact that there is no position
ahead of him "open"--for there are no "positions." We have no
cut-and-dried places--our best men make their places. This is easy
enough to do, for there is always work, and when you think of getting
the work done instead of finding a title to fit a man who wants to be
promoted, then there is no difficulty about promotion. The promotion
itself is not formal; the man simply finds himself doing something other
than what he was doing and getting more money.

All of our people have thus come up from the bottom. The head of the
factory started as a machinist. The man in charge of the big River Rouge
plant began as a patternmaker. Another man overseeing one of the
principal departments started as a sweeper. There is not a single man
anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street.
Everything that we have developed has been done by men who have
qualified themselves with us. We fortunately did not inherit any
traditions and we are not founding any. If we have a tradition it is
this:

Everything can always be done better than it is being done.

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 rating of a department is
gained by dividing the number of parts produced by the number of hands
working. Every foreman checks his own department daily--he carries the
figures always with him. The superintendent has a tabulation of all the
scores; if there is something wrong in a department the output score
shows it at once, the superintendent makes inquiries and the foreman
looks alive. A considerable part of the incentive to better methods is
directly traceable to this simple rule-of-thumb method of rating
production. 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.