The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Chapter 19 What We May Expect .................................................... 239
Prosperity Should Be within Everybody’s Reach ................241
Focus on Service, and Profits Will Take Care of 
Themselves ...........................................................................241
A Restatement of Ford’s Basic Principles ....................... 243
Look for Multiple Product Uses ........................................... 245
The Role of the Individual in the Advancement of 
Industry ................................................................................... 247
Standardization as the Servant and Not the Master ......... 249
The Need for Sustainable Manufacturing ............................251
Conclusion .......................................................................................... 253
References ............................................................................................ 255

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xi
Preface
My Life and Work is easily the best and most comprehensive business lead-
ership book ever written, and nothing has come forward in the subse-
quent 90 years to surpass it. What proves it best is the fact that Henry Ford 
wrote it only after he used its principles to achieve unprecedented world-
class results in every enterprise to which he applied them. Charles Buxton 
Going, the managing editor of Engineering Magazine, described some of 
these results as early as 1915:
Ford’s success has startled the country, almost the world, financially, 
industrially, mechanically. It exhibits in higher degree than most persons 
would have thought possible the seemingly contradictory requirements of 
true efficiency, which are: constant increase of quality, great increase of pay 
to the workers, repeated reduction in cost to the consumer. And with these 
appears, as at once cause and effect, an absolutely incredible enlargement 
of output reaching something like one hundred fold in less than ten years, 
and an enormous profit to the manufacturer (Arnold and Faurote, 1915, 
iii).
The reconciliation of “the seemingly contradictory requirements” in 
question deserves particular attention. Ford overthrew the destructive par-
adigm that the only way to increase profits was to shortchange the worker, 
overcharge the customer, squeeze the supplier, or a combination of all three. 
Ford turned business into a win–win activity that delivered more value to 
everybody involved, and thereby realized the following explicit results:
•  Chapter 3 will show that Ford bought out his minority stockholders 
for no less than $125 on the dollar. This is the language of money that 
gains buy-in from executives, managers, and investors.
•  Ford quadrupled his workers’ wages in 20 years, which corresponds 
to an annual growth rate of 7.2%. This is the language of money that 
earns buy-in from the workforce.
•  The Model T, including the industries that grew to support its 
manufacture, contributed more than the estimated wealth of 35 of 
the country’s 48 states to the nation’s prosperity during 19 years of 
production (Ford and Crowther, 1930, 177). This is the language of 

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xii  •  Preface
money that should gain buy-in from government policymakers and 
elected officials.
•  Ford reduced the American work week from a customary 6–12 hours  
day, to the familiar 5-day, 40-hour work week.
•  The Ford Motor Company and its Lean manufacturing methods 
made the United States the most productive nation on Earth, and was 
therefore directly responsible for the Allied victory in World War II. 
Ford’s production chief Charles Sorensen designed the Willow Run 
bomber factory, which could deliver a B-24 Liberator bomber every 
hour.
My Life and Work is emphatically not a mechanistic or industry-specific 
formula that the practitioner can follow like a work instruction in a fac-
tory. It is instead an easily understandable synergy of impartial laws of 
economics, science, and human behavior. Ford called this synergy a uni-
versal code, and its mastery should be the reader’s key learning objective.
This universal code delivered proven results in industries ranging from 
automobile manufacture to coal mines, railroads, and even healthcare as 
practiced in the Henry and Clara Ford Hospital. The latter has enormous 
implications in the context of today’s out of control healthcare costs.
The Ford Motor Company prospered consistently, and even during bad 
economic times, while it conformed to Ford’s precepts. Only when Ford’s 
successors forgot or went against the universal code did the company 
decline to the extent that Ford executives who visited Japan in 1982 did 
not even recognize the Toyota Production System as their own company’s 
creation.
*
 Ford workers unionized only after the company’s management 
violated Ford’s precepts on a square deal for labor, which this book will 
prove almost certainly included a no-layoff policy.
Nations also prosper when they follow Ford’s guidance, while economic 
catastrophe is the inevitable result of its contravention. The universal 
code, therefore, is not only impartial, scientific, and nonpartisan, it is also 
implacable and unforgiving like any law of nature.
My Life and Work thus offers proven solutions to the decline of the 
American middle class, and the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to places 
like China. American industrialists recognized cheap offshore labor as a 
* 
One Japanese executive referred repeatedly to “the book.” When Ford executives asked about the 
book, he responded, “It’s Henry Ford’s book, of course; your company’s book” (Stuelpnagel, 1993).

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Preface  •  xiii
threat more than 100 years ago, and they offered a very explicit solution of 
which Ford’s business system was the ultimate culmination:
We are justly proud of the high wage rates which prevail throughout our 
country, and jealous of any interference with them by the products of the 
cheaper labor of other countries. To maintain this condition, to strengthen 
our control of home markets, and, above all, to broaden our opportuni-
ties in foreign markets where we must compete with the products of other 
industrial nations, we should welcome and encourage every influence 
tending to increase the efficiency of our productive processes (Henry R. 
Towne’s Preface to Taylor, 1911b, 10).
Taylor (1911a, 75) added even more explicitly:
… the one element more than any other which differentiates civilized 
from uncivilized countries—prosperous from poverty-stricken peo-
ples—is that the average man in the one is five or six times as productive 
as the other.
Ford’s realization of far greater per capita productivity transformed the 
United States from a primarily agrarian society into the wealthiest and 
most powerful nation on Earth during the first part of the twentieth cen-
tury. My Life and Work shows exactly how he did it, and it contains all the 
basic principles necessary for the United States to regain its lead in manu-
facturing and service productivity
Ford wrote for ordinary workers instead of MBA and PhD candidates, 
although the actual content of his publications is very suitable for the lat-
ter. The original book is, therefore, an easily understandable repository of 
priceless concepts and principles. This edition expands on the original with 
modern perspectives that explain and organize Ford’s thought process very 
explicitly. It is the specific mission of this book to lead the United States 
back to its rightful status as the world’s most productive nation, and with 
corresponding prosperity, affluence, and military security for all its citizens.