The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

FORD’S KEYNOTES OF PRODUCTION
This chapter’s concluding section is particularly important because it 
states very explicitly Ford’s principles for job design:
  1. Too much room for workers is as bad as too little room. It wastes 
floor space and, more importantly, it introduces nonvalue-adding 
distance over which the work must move.
  2. Subdivide operations to eliminate nonvalue-adding motions, along 
with accompanying variation in processing and material transfer times.
  3. Design for manufacture or assembly.
* * *
There is no manual handling of material. There is not a single hand opera-
tion. 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 fac-
tory 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 produc-
tion. 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 auto-
mobile production at our highest point of around four thousand cars a day!

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75
6
Machines and Men
This chapter begins with a warning against bureaucracy and a “silo men-
tality” in which job descriptions limit creativity and willingness to take 
responsibility. The first paragraphs anticipate W. Edwards Deming’s and 
Tom Peters’ advice to break down organizational barriers (Deming) and 
make the organization porous (Peters). The chapter later reinforces this 
material with the statement: “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.”
Another key takeaway from this chapter is the principle that no official 
title can convey the right to lead others. This right, which China calls the 
Mandate of Heaven, comes instead from the prospective leader’s service 
to his or her followers and organization. This concept ties in closely with 
“the law of the situation,” in which the de facto leader is the person who is 
most qualified to guide, facilitate, and, otherwise, lead others to achieve a 
specific goal.
The absence of official job titles is also consistent with current practice 
at Honda’s Marysville, Ohio plant. Participants in Y-gaya (informal and 
open discussion) meetings “are instructed to leave their titles at the door” 
(Cable, 2012, p. 28).