Things I learned from Henry Ford’s book ‘My Life and Work’. I have not quoted him, these are just how his ideas added to my understanding of the world.
Focus on service, not the reward. The work is what creates the results.
The principles of service are:
1. An absence of fear of the future and of veneration for the past. One
who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure
is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no
disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail. What
is past is useful only as it suggests ways and means for progress.
2. A disregard of competition. Whoever does a thing best ought to be the
one to do it. It is criminal to try to get business away from another
man–criminal because one is then trying to lower for personal gain the
condition of one’s fellow man–to rule by force instead of by intelligence.
3. The putting of service before profit. Without a profit, business
cannot extend. There is nothing inherently wrong about making a profit.
Well-conducted business enterprise cannot fail to return a profit, but
profit must and inevitably will come as a reward for good service. It
cannot be the basis–it must be the result of service.
4. Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is the process
of buying materials fairly and, with the smallest possible addition of
cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product and giving
it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating, and sharp dealing, tend only to clog this progression.
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Business men believe that you could do anything by “financing” it. If
did not succeed on the first financing, then the idea was to
“refinance.” The process was simply sending good money after bad. In the majority of cases the failure was from bad management, so was just
paying poor managers to keep up their bad management a little longer.
The only foundation of real business is service.
Given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it, than hunting around for a new idea. One idea at a time is as much as anyone can handle.
Good to be selling something that is a universal necessity and that you can do in quantity.
No work which is something you are interested in, is hard.
Draw a plan and work out every detail on the plan before start to build. Otherwise lots of time wasted in makeshifts and finished article not have coherence. It will not be rightly proportioned.
Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.
Most businesses conduct themselves by giving large attention to finances and smaller attention to service, but this is the reverse of the natural process that money comes from work and not before work. Profit is made from work, not from just putting money into things.
The pressing to make a short term profit on an “investment”–can lead to skimping of work and hence of service. It was the cause of low wages–for without well-directed work, high wages cannot be paid. If the whole attention
is not given to the work, it cannot be the first consideration and well directed. So counter productively it is the money and not the work that counted. It is illogical that money should be put ahead
of work, profit comes
from work. The desire seemed to be to find a short cut to money and
to pass over the obvious best route–which is through the work.
Most businesses indifferent to better methods of manufacture, as long as it got by and brought in money. So no reference for how greatly served public, just how much money got for it and no care if customer was satisfied.
If a man does his work well, the price he gets for that work, profits and financial matters will take care of themselves.
So a business should start small and build itself up out of its earnings. If there are no earnings then that is a signal that owner is wasting his time and does not belong in that
business. Some people want to do it faster by starting off with largest possible capitalisation, then sell all the stocks and bonds that they can. Whatever money left over after all the huge stock and bond-selling expenses and promoters, charges and all that, grudgingly goes into the foundation of the business. I could not see how a business could be expected to be able to charge into its product a great big bond interest.
The sale of the machine is only an
introduction. If the machine does not give service, then it is better
for the manufacturer if he never had the introduction, as worst of all advertisements is a a dissatisfied customer. Salesman on commission just see selling a car as the accomplishment and it does not matter what happens to the buyer after, as only paid only for what they sell. It is right on this point that he made the largest selling argument for the Ford. A man who buys a car is entitled to continuous use of that car, the success of the Ford car was that service was an outstanding element.
Need to have a long term view, short term financial aims breaks up service, because it looks to the immediate dollar, future business will be sacrificed for making money today.
The only use of money is to
buy tools to work with or the product of tools. Therefore money is worth
what it will help you to produce or buy and no more and that is how the rate of investment return should be worked out. Any return should come after it has produced, not before.
Many men in business feel that
their lot was hard–they work against a day when they might retire and
live on an income–get out of the strife. Life to them was a battle to
be ended as soon as possible. Life is not a battle except with our own
tendency to sag with the downpull of “getting settled.” If to petrify is
success all one has to do is to humour the lazy side of the mind but if
to grow is success, then one must wake up anew every morning and keep
awake all day.
Many great businesses become a ghost because someone thought they could be managed just as they were always managed. The management may have been excellent in its day, but it was alert in it’s day, not in slavish following of its yesterdays. Life is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself “settled” is not settled–he is probably sagging back. Everything is in flux, and was meant to be. Life flows. We may live at the same number of the street, but it is never the same man who lives there.
Out of the delusion that life is a battle that may be lost by a false move, comes a great love for regularity. Men fall into the half-alive habit. People do not take up new more efficient production methods. Habit conduces to a certain inertia, and any disturbance of it affects the mind like trouble. Even if workmen might be taught to produce with less useless motion and fatigue,
it is opposed by the workmen themselves as it interferes with the well-worn grooves in which they have
become accustomed to move. Business men go down because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. Men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year’s ideas. When a man begins to think that he has at last found his method, normally some part of him has gone to sleep. If a man thinks he is “fixed” for life, it indicates that the next jolt of the wheel of progress is going to fling him off.
There a great fear of being thought a fool by public opinion. It
is not a bad thing to be a fool for righteousness’ sake. The best
is that such fools usually live long enough to prove that they were not
fools–or the work they have begun lives long enough to prove they were
not foolish.
Time spent fighting competition is wasted, better off just doing the work. There are always enough people ready and anxious to buy, provided you supply what they want and at the proper price. Trying to get rid of competition to get more money for less work is always a bad idea. Whether it is collaboration between competitors to restrict supply and raise the price, trade unions and so on. Creating artificial monopolies is a waste of time, just focus on the work.
A man who runs a business, can never leave his business, he needs to think of it by day and dream of it by night. If just working work office hours, then will just be an employee accepting direction, not a director or manager of anything. A manual labourer must limit his hours, otherwise he will wear himself out. However if he intends to go forward and be a manager or director, the end of his shift must only be a signal to start thinking over the day’s work in order to discover how it might be done better.
(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 any one who thinks first of service–of
doing the work in the best possible way.
Chapter 3
It is always possible to do a thing better the second time, so processes should be that people try and do something as many times as possible.
If in a hurry to obtain something to sell, a person does not take time for adequate preparation.
Should take one’s best selling article and concentrate on it. Then plan day and night and probably for years, first on something which will best suit the public and then on how it should be made. The exact processes
of manufacturing will develop of themselves. Then, if we shift the
manufacturing from the profit to the service basis, we shall have a real
business in which the profits will be all that any one could desire. All that has to be done in order to adopt it is to overcome the habit of grabbing at the nearest dollar as though it were the only dollar in the world.
It is impossible to get a product on which one may concentrate, unless an
unlimited amount of study is given beforehand. It is not just an
afternoon’s work.
Best to have just one model of car, if have more models, producer’s energies are scattered and it makes each one more expensive to make, so in total sell less units in total.
Once a car comes off production line, it should be given to testing staff to test it.
If you give attention to work and service, you will not need to strain your resources because they will increase more rapidly than you can devise ways and means of disposing of them.
To get good staff they must see the job as being stable.
Pay sales staff the very highest reward for service and then insist upon getting the highest service.
Chapter 4
Once a prosperous company, could easily have sat down and said: “Now we have arrived. Let us hold what we have got.”
When production reached one
hundred cars a day, he hoped before long to make a thousand a
day. The temptation to stop and hang on to what one has is quite natural. I
can entirely sympathize with the desire snd urge to quit a life of activity and
retire to a life of ease. He thinks that a man who retires ought
entirely to get out of a business. There is a disposition to retire and
retain control. Progress is merely as an invitation to do more–as an indication that have reached a place where might begin to perform a real service.
Study the competitions’ products, take them apart, see how they do things better. Then from what you have learned, see if you can push it further and do it even better.
Products have to be fool proof, so users if them cannot mess them up.
The less complex an article, the easier it is to make, the cheaper it may be sold, and therefore the greater number may be sold.
Any defect in service must be instantly and rigorously investigated, but when the suggestion is only as to style, one has to make sure it is not merely one person’s whim that does not reflect the other buyers who have not said anything.
People thought Ford’s large mass production factory would go wrong, only because of their failure to grasp that a principle rather than an individual was at work, and the principle was so simple that it seemed mysterious.
It was the application of modern mass production manufacturing methods that lowered the price and heightened the quality. Henry Ford just developed a discovery, or idea and this idea was the nucleus of the business.
An inventor or a thoughtful workman works out a new and better
way to serve some established human need; the idea commends itself, and
people want to avail themselves of it. In this way a single individual
may prove, through his idea or discovery, the nucleus of a business. But the creation of the body and bulk of that business is shared by everyone
who has anything to do with it.
No manufacturer can say: “I built this
business”–if he has required the help of thousands of men in building
it. It is a joint production. Everyone employed in it has contributed
something to it.
Chapter 5
Money is made from ideas that reduce the costs of production, or increases what can be sold for the same cost. All the little improvements add up to a lot.
It is the product that pays the wages, management that arranges the production so that the product may pay the wages. The employer only handles the money.
If unskilled workers do not learn their jobs within a few hours or days, they will never be of any use to the business. They need to be able to do enough work to pay the overhead charges on the floor space they occupy.
Two general principles in all operations to reduce costs and increase productivity:
▪that a man shall never have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided.
▪no man need ever stoop over.
The principles of assembly are these:
(1) Place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that
each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in
the process of finishing.
(2) Use work slides or some other form of carrier so that when a workman
completes his operation, he drops the part always in the same
place–which place must always be the most convenient place to his
hand–and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next workman
for his operation.
(3) Use sliding assembling lines by which the parts to be assembled are
delivered at convenient distances.
These principles enable the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of the worker and reduction of his movements to a minimum. As nearly as possible he only he does one thing with only one movement.
The man who places a part does not fasten it–the part may not be fully
in place until after several operations later. The man who puts in a
bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not
tighten it.
Try every new thing just a little at first, have to know absolutely that the new way is better before ripping out all of the old way.
The following enabled 3-4 times more production per worker.
1, making it so that if is an 84 stage production process to build an object, 84 workers each do one of the assembly processes.
2, raising level of production line so no one bends over.
3, then can speed up the line as a result.
A worker must not be hurried in his work–he must have every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second.
Dividing and subdividing operations, keeping the work in motion–those are the keynotes of production.
Unskilled people can be used as must only be skilled in exactly one operation, which the most stupid man can learn
within two days.
Every piece of work in the shops moves, the point is that there is no lifting or trucking of anything other than materials and these are brought to the line by transportation department on their vehicles.
If one man has failed to succeed with a new production method and everyone says it is impossible. Another man may well succeed. Maybe first person did not try again and again, know, or pay attention to the previous production figures.
None of our men are “experts.” 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 recognise 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.”
Not a single operation is ever considered as being done in the best or
cheapest way.
Old processes like casting metal which have been done for hundreds or thousands of years, have accumulated many traditions which make improvements extraordinarily difficult to bring about.
Even a worker having to shift their feet when making something, can double how long it can take to do the job.
Every production line has inspectors at the end of it, even for example a small line for making pistons.
Foremen analyse every movement a person makes with stopwatch, to see how methods can be improved.
Every foot of space not used carries an overhead expense, we want none of that waste.
All the car parts are designed so that they can be most easily made.
Chapter 6
The hardest fight in bringing together a large number of people to do work is against excess organization and consequent red tape.
The hierarchy charts where a message from the bottom, has to go through every level until it gets to the top causes messages:
▪hugely slow speeds
▪incorrect degraded communications.
▪become gathered into a pound of criticisms, suggestions, and
comments.
▪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.
People should just go directly to who they need to speak to, however high up that may be.
So must have no organization, no specific duties attaching to any position, no line of succession or of authority, very few titles, and no conferences. Only the clerical help that is absolutely required; no elaborate records of any kind, and
consequently no red tape.
We make the individual responsibility complete. People do not have their job roles defined, just their area, team they are in. Managers have team, floor, factory they are in charge of and so on.
No specific duties, all have jobs, but there are no limits to their jobs. People just go themselves to work in where they best fit. Every man has to know what is going on in his area of responsibility.
A group of men, wholly intent
upon getting work done, have no difficulty in seeing that the work is
done so it is not haphazard. The work controls people, not titles.
No titles and limits to a person’s authority means:
▪people not thinking about the limits of their authority, because they are thinking of titles.
▪bosses are fine if their staff go over their head, which makes them behave better as an injustice will be found out.
▪people not using them to get out of doing work.
▪not using them to look down on others.
▪not get people who are not real leaders, but have a title which is big cause of disatisfaction among workers.
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.
▪ Not the division of responsibility from titles, which leads to a removal of responsibility altogether. 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. People pass the buck, passing responsibility on saying not covered by their department. Every staff member, whatever his place, must feel that everything that happens
to come to his notice relating to the welfare of the business is his own
job.
▪ Big 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.
Must not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a man starts to swell with authority, he looses that job, or goes back to a machine.
A large amount of labour unrest comes from the unjust exercise of authority by those in subordinate positions.
Offices and all that cause people to give up their time to office work and to wondering why did they not have a better office than some other fellow.
If a man 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.
If men are unhampered and know that they are serving, they will always put all of mind and will into even the most trivial of tasks.
Work is our sanity, our self respect, our salvation.
Policy is to reduce price, extend operations and improve the product, the price reduction coming first. Believe that lowering price increases sales, so more people can have the item and more jobs. Would rather higher sales on lower margins than lower sales on higher margin.
No costs are fixed. First work out price that will get higher sales, then try and produce for that price. Do not worry about costs, new price forces costs down. If first take costs to determine the price, then people just produce it for that price. No one knows what the costs ought to be, have to name a price so low it forces everyone to the highest level of efficency. The low price makes everyone dig for profits. They make more discoveries about production and selling under this method than by any method of leisurely investigation.
Everything and everybody must produce or get out.
Get rid of every statistic and order blank that do not help in the production of a car. Do not want any done because they are interesting.
Can make things for an impossibly low price by eliminating waste, not by lowering wages or playing with financial concepts.
Everyone must be productive or get out, if person’s job no longer required, they are offered a different one in the company. Need to really bore into the business.
Producing more than one item leads to more departments and scattered production, which tends to be more wasteful. Best to produce a single product.
Need to watch efficiency of production, not just the money.
Lowering prices is a way to build the business.
Being economic and not using things is a waste, everything was given to us to use.
•People who limit how much they can have and enjoy become shrivelled, body and soul. They waste their body and the juices of life.
▪There is the waste of riotous living.
▪The waste of not doing anything and so rotting away.
▪ Better to invest than save, then stuff is being used.
Waste is another term for misuse.
Use is positive, active, life giving, alive and adds to the sum of good.
Money has no more wealth than people put into it by production, can be so superstitiously worshipped as real wealth that destroys it’s value altogether.
Need a sound system built on service.
Nobody can get more out of life, than they can produce, but everyone thinks they can. Everyone wants more.
Is about people becoming self reliant and not dependent on charity.
Most people fail because they allow themselves to be beaten by the natural difficulties that attend any kind of effort. They say that they are beaten before having finished the task. So do not see if their vision will really work as they have not implemented it.
Most people fail as they not stick at it doing it, not because of lack of wisdom, brilliance, or money.
People see another person’s success at the same thing and it appears easy, when it was very very hard. Failure is easy to achieve and success is hard.
Be self sufficient, taking charity and being coddled is a drug.
Whatever fortune or misfortune happens to you, you are a man and be a man which means you can achieve things.
Being self employed will show you what you really are inside, both good bits and things need to work on.
Need managers who run a company on common sense and according to changing circumstances. The managers cannot do this if hampered by rules, laws, government regulation and having to go for counsel, as this is not how a business can be run.
Bankers and lawyers do not know how to run a company so be careful of what they inflict on it, especially from their self interest.
Need to focus on maximum service at minimum cost, then a business will make money and improve.
Often lots of money can be saved by paying outstanding and new legal claims at once and on the facts, which makes lawyer costs very low. Without that can end up with huge cost of employing loads of lawyers.
Also be aware of un necessary accounting and red tape, normally only one person is needed to do this work for a huge organisation. This with the reduction of lawyers, can reduce an organisation’s costs by 40%.
Everyone in the organisation must be of the mindset that it is a service and that sorts everything out in the business.
Any problems that customers have such as delays are criticisms of work and must be investigated, not defended by lawyers and so on.
The business needs to be run by practical people with practical experience in the industry. Not by bankers, people who are interested in procedure, or where interest is financial and not the practical work of that particular industry.
Throwing money at a badly run business, or management team is just fuelling it to continue going in that same way.
Businesses often do not see themselves as being there for serving the customers, but being there for the benefit of themselves. As a result they make jobs go round as many people, departments as possible and take as long as possible, so everyone gets a piece of the profit.
Get rid of all titles and offices unless required by law. Rigid organisation means messages have to go up certain lines of authority and no person expected to do anything without explicit orders from a superior.
Needs to be about personal responsibility and not the habit of waiting for orders, men must not be scared of taking responsibility because may get blamed if get it wrong. They should be blamed for not taking responsibility and initiative.
No overtime pay, if finishes job early then does something else. If works more time then takes time off at future day. No extra money for working over.
It is one of God’s compensations to withdraw prosperity from a business that does not serve.
Reducing the amount charging for the product or service, always means that get more business.
Should always be interested in every search for useful new knowledge.
Need a broad vision and understanding, be able to see past your area of knowledge and know that it cannot solve, or be the best solution for everything.
Do not recognise any limitations, or that anything is impossible. The ‘impossible’ is only stuff that do not yet have the knowledge to do.
It is about teaching people to be self sufficient, self supporting, learning to help themselves. Work on improving the people in the country, not the country itself. Then there can be the greatest and richest trading between parties.
Every person has a natural distinct strain of genius of which no other person can cheat it. Need to work from a person’s natural speciality and not grabbing things which promotes war. This must be done as a service, which will leads to universal self respect and peace.
( Henry Ford expressed this as countries, but i think it works for people as well)
Every person has a natural distinct strain of genius of which no other person can cheat it. Need to work from a person’s natural speciality and not grabbing things which promotes war. This must be done as a service, which will leads to universal self respect and peace.
( Henry Ford expressed this as countries, but i think it works for people as well)
Thinking is the hardest work anyone can do, which is probably the reason we have so few thinkers.
True education is gained through the discipline of life.
Great piles of knowledge in the head, is not the same as mental activity of finding things out for oneself, which is far more satisfying.
Past learning must not hinder future learning, thinking that we know it all. There is so much more for mankind to learn, knowledge to be gained, secrets yet to discover.
What can you do to help and heal the world is the real test, just gathering knowledge for it’s own sake is useless. A man may not be knowledgeable on everything, but when he is master of his own sphere, whatever it may be, he has won his degree, he has entered the realm of wisdom.
Bosses must do all they can to help their workers and that is part of being a well organised society. If a boss waits until they are compelled to help, they are a blind boss which are a disease and union leaders are the antedote.
Need to be wide awake to reorganise for efficient production
Honest enough to charge necessary costs and no more.
If company finds way to do job with one less person, such a company is normally enterprising enough to find a job for that tenth person, bound to grow and growth means more jobs.
A company that grows and creates more jobs and opportunities for people to make a good living, is one where every worker does a day’s work that they are proud of.
A well run company is always looking to lower costs to the public. So although that results in less people being needed for a production process, that kind of company will grow and so will create more jobs.
It is easier for lazy management to hire new people to do new work, than improve methods so existing people can be released to do it. This makes things less efficient and so goods more expensive to the consumer. Especially common when business is booming.
A person recognising that the absence of reason is never made good by the use of violence, will lead them to get from others prestige and respect of their opinions and desires.
Make no attempt to coddle workers, it is a give and take arrangement. More salery for workers results in them being supervised more.
Only deal with own workers and not outside union representatives.
Social spirit cannot be created from nice words, lectures, propoganda and bulletins which do nothing. Only acts, sincerely done of real things, that cost the management something and benefit all, do anything. Only this shows good intentions and builds respect.
A business that provides income for so many babies, children, parents, adults and so on is a sacred thing. Greater than the importance of any one person.
Employees want a boss they can trust to steer the business and not endanger their security. They do not judge him by his title, but the size of the payroll that comes to them from the activities of the business.
Harmony from a common purpose, honestly believed in and genuinely desired is good. Hiring workers just because they harmonise means there will be no progress, (he said it was because needs to be competition and thrust and counter thrust of real life. I think more positive if is that progress comes from people creating things and these creating people will always have differing opinions.)
People who are so soft and flabby, have to ‘have an atmosphere of good feeling’ and fail in business and as characters. They do not have enough mental and moral hardiness, like their bones are not strong enough to stand on their own two feet.
Be careful not to work with people because you like them, this does not mean they are the best at the job. The best at the job maybe someone you dislike.
Thinking things are ‘good enough’, hinders progress.
Be careful not to work with people because you like them, this does not mean they are the best at the job. The best at the job maybe someone you dislike.
Thinking things are ‘good enough’, hinders progress.
Having surplus stuff like excess money is pointless, a person can only live in 1 room at a time, eat same quantity and quality of food, be warmed by so much clothing.
However if has visions of service, to make an industrial desert bloom like a rose. Then work-a-day life, blossoms into fresh and enthusiastic human motives of higher character and human efficiency. Then money is like seeds which creates a rich harvest, which can be selfishly confined no more than the sun’s rays can.
Hoarding money does not give a person power.
Moving money from one class to another cannot cure the world’s ills.
Business is easy or hard, depending upon how skilled or lacking skill a person displays at production and distribution.
Business is there for service, not profit.
Most faults in business are caused by the moral constitution in business. Once ethics in business are universally recognised, it will be seen as one of the oldest and most useful of all the professions.
All that Ford did was to evidence by works, that service comes before profit and the sort of business that makes the world better for it’s presence is a noble profession. Success was earned by unremitting labour and faith in principle. It is impossible to avoid making a much larger profit, than if profit were the main object.
The new is always thought of as odd, some can never get over thinking that a new thing is odd and probably not right and shady.
Poverty cannot be abolished by formula, only by hard and intelligent work.
All their work is done by:
1, Not fear the future or venerate the past. One who fears the future, fears failure, then limits their activities. Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again. No disgrace in honest failure, only disgrace in fearing to fail. The past is only useful as suggests ways and means for progress.
2, Disregard competition. Whoever does the thing the best, ought to be the one to do it. It is criminal to try and get business away from a fellow man, as then trying to for personal gain, lower the conditions of one’s fellow men, to rule by force instead of intelligence.
3, Putting service before profit. Without a profit, business cannot extend. There is nothing wrong about making a profit, well conducted business enterprises cannot help but make a profit, but profit must and inevitability will come from good service. Profit cannot be the basis, it must be the result of good service.
4, Manufacturing is not buying low and selling high. It is buying materials fairly and with the smallest possible additional cost, transforming those materials into a consumable product abd distributing it to the consumer. Gambling, speculating and sharp dealing only clog this progression.
It is the spirit behind it that matters most, a real desire to be of service from which follows production which is a service. Artificial rules and laws set up by finance and industry, break down frequently.
People so wrapped up with what they are doing, but need to look at reasons why doing them.
Henry Ford
Winning must come from improvement of product, excel at service, improve scientific methods of production. Must not come from damaging rivals and other parties, this benefits no one. The negative ways of trying to monopolise the market and crowd out others comes from a desire for money.
When the market collapses for an asset in your business, look for other markets that can use it. If demand for corn as food dries up, maybe can be used as fuel.
Interest collecting, credit controlling financiers own all the money and the machinery bough with it.
Advancement is not easy, the higher a person goes, the more responsibility and the harder the job. After a person has worked hard they have a right to and will get some comfortable and pleasant ease, but not before. Of course intelligent and tools should be used to make the job as easy as possible.
A man’s real work is what he is chosen to do by God (not other men), not what he chooses for himself to do.
People do not object, to work itself. They object to if a work is:
•so heavy it saps their strength
•drudgery and monotiny
A job may seem menial, but what matters is that it useful, respectable and honest.
Systems need to be tightened up, remove haphazard will of the individual. This is to reduce waste and losses due to mediocrity, to prevent an individual who does not care from doing their worst.
By making it necessary for a don’t care person to do better than they naturally would, it is for their benefit. They are better off financially, psychologically and physically. Also if those people were trusted to their own methods and speed of production, everyone would have lower saleries.
Must have great brains involved in every operation in the factory, these are not the people at the machine, but those working out the production techniques. Better brains means it is a better production technique, no system operates itself.
To get promoted a person has to do the routine work and still stay alive and alert. A growing company will have new job opportunities but need to be patient for when they come. Big businesses grow slowly and cautiously and the person needs to have shown that they are dependable and reliable. So even most ambitious person needs to allow time for things to happen.
The spirit of true service creates things for the creator, a person just has to do it sincerely.
Lifetime Wisdom 