The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

BEWARE OF COMPLACENCY
The statement “… when business becomes a mere plantation on which to 
live, and not a big work which one has to do—then you may expect trou-
ble” is consistent with Lawrence Miller’s Barbarians to Bureaucrats (1989). 
This reference describes the almost inevitable life cycle of organizations 
and even countries whose own success leads to their takeover by bureau-
crats and aristocrats; the kind of people who are temperamentally unable 
to respond to new threats and opportunities.
This lesson is particularly important because Ford himself fell vic-
tim to complacency even though he recognized its dangers. Ford (1922, 
pp. 27–29) even has a chapter entitled “Be Very Careful of Success,” and 
it stresses explicitly that success can ruin a capable business by making it 
complacent. The Model T’s success turned Ford himself into an aristocrat 
who believed that the product he had created would sustain his company 
forever, and all that he needed to do was to continue to reduce its price. 
Ford agreed only under pressure from his management team to introduce 
the Model A to compete with new vehicles that had more features than the 
Model T.
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But the process of making the article will require constant care. Machinery 
wears out and needs to be restored. Men grow uppish, lazy, or careless. A 
business is men and machines united in the production of a commodity, and 
both the man and the machines need repairs and replacements. Sometimes 
it is the men “higher up” who most need revamping—and they themselves 
are always the last to recognize it. When a business becomes congested with 
bad methods; when a business becomes ill through lack of attention to one 
or more of its functions; when executives sit comfortably back in their chairs 
as if the plans they inaugurated are going to keep them going forever; when 
business becomes a mere plantation on which to live, and not a big work 
which one has to do—then you may expect trouble. You will wake up some 
fine morning and find yourself doing more business than you have ever done 
before—and getting less out of it. You find yourself short of money. You can 
borrow money. And you can do it, oh, so easily. People will crowd money 
on you. It is the most subtle temptation the young business man has. But if 
you do borrow money you are simply giving a stimulant to whatever may be 
wrong. You feed the disease. Is a man more wise with borrowed money than 
he is with his own? Not as a usual thing. To borrow under such conditions is 
to mortgage a declining property.

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Money and Goods  •  147
The time for a business man to borrow money, if ever, is when he does not 
need it. That is, when he does not need it as a substitute for the things he 
ought himself to do. If a man’s business is in excellent condition and in need 
of expansion, it is comparatively safe to borrow. But if a business is in need 
of money through mismanagement, then the thing to do is to get into the 
business and correct the trouble from the inside—not poultice it with loans 
from the outside.