The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

FORD THOUGHT PROCESS
Mastery of the Ford thought process equips the practitioner to recognize 
all wastes of time, material, and energy on sight. This thought process is 
similar to that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s protagonist Sherlock Holmes, 
whose most important talent was his ability to notice seemingly trivial 
things that everybody else overlooked. Ford and Crowther (1930, p. 187) 
describe evidence of waste almost the way Holmes would describe clues 
at a crime scene:
It is the little things that are hard to see—the awkward little methods of 
doing things that have grown up and which no one notices. And since 

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xxii  •  Editor’s Introduction
manufacturing is solely a matter of detail, these little things develop, when 
added together, into very big things.
Myriad forms of waste that were previously invisible become imme-
diately obvious to anybody who has learned the Ford thought process. 
Recognition of waste or muda (Japanese for futility, uselessness, idleness) is 
a prerequisite for its removal, and the Ford culture apparently taught all its 
workers how to recognize waste on sight. Many if not most waste reduction 
projects resulted from workers’ identification of waste, and this reinforces 
the need for worker engagement and buy-in. Norwood (1931, Chapter X) 
uses the phrase “it worried the men,” with “it” being material waste, such as 
chips from machining operations, more than once to describe the process 
of “converting waste into millions.” The millions were in the money of the 
early 1930s, when dollar coins were still made from silver.
Bennett (1951, pp. 32–33) meanwhile describes how Ford himself pointed 
to rust in a pile of slag and objected immediately to the waste of valuable 
iron. Ford noticed something, in this case rust, that was seemingly very 
trivial, but that actually indicated a significant loss of money. This story 
anticipates the modern concept of dumpster diving, or examination of 
everything that the factory throws away, to identify waste.
Ford’s Holmesian powers of observation, which are easily teachable to 
an entire workforce, also apply to waste of time. Consider Ford’s statement 
about railroads in Chapter 16: “A car on a siding is … a great big question 
mark.” A rail car that is not in motion is either adding lead time to its 
cargo or is else an idle capital asset, but how many people pay attention 
to rail cars on sidings? How many people pay attention if a factory worker 
walks to get parts, or bends over at the waist? Ford, or anybody who had 
worked for a few weeks in one of his factories, would on the other hand 
notice the waste motion immediately. The same applies to the accumula-
tion of parts on a conveyor or a work slide; this indicated a stoppage at the 
subsequent workstation. The Ford workforce could even recognize activi-
ties that a value stream analysis would call “processes” and, therefore, 
value-adding, but were actually 100% rework.
This kind of thinking, in turn, resulted in enormous reductions of 
cycle time and inventory. Ford even went so far as to do successfully what 
Goldratt and Cox (1992) showed to be impossible; he operated a balanced 
factory at close to 100% capacity. Chapters 5 and 10 will demonstrate that 
he achieved this through the suppression of almost all variation in pro-
cessing and material transfer times.

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Editor’s Introduction  •  xxiii
Meanwhile, it is useful, again because Ford and his co-author Samuel 
Crowther did not organize their material like that in a modern business 
book or textbook, to cite the most important chapters and their content. 
The purely autobiographical material is interesting, but the reader can 
probably skip it without missing anything vital. Other portions of the 
book, and especially those that illustrate Ford’s universal code, deserve