The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Focus on Service, and Profits Will Take Care of Themselves
Recall that Ford’s results in the language of money prove the truth in the 
statement that, if the organization puts the job first, the money will take 
care of itself. The following material reminds the reader that Ford began 
with almost nothing, and that his company earned everything it had 
“by unremitting labour and faith in a principle.” This success included 
not only automobiles and tractors but, as this book has already shown, 

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242  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
railroads and a world-class hospital. Ford’s methods were equally success-
ful in mining and every other enterprise to which he applied them, which 
suggests strongly that all the United States needs to do to correct its cur-
rent economic problems is to diligently apply Ford’s universal code.
* * *
The business of life is easy or hard according to the skill or the lack of skill 
displayed in production and distribution. It has been thought that business 
existed for profit. That is wrong. Business exists for service. It is a profession, 
and must have recognized professional ethics, to violate which declasses a 
man. Business needs more of the professional spirit. The professional spirit 
seeks professional integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The profes-
sional spirit detects its own violations and penalizes them. Business will some 
day become clean. A machine that stops every little while is an imperfect 
machine, and its imperfection is within itself. A body that falls sick every 
little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself. So with business. 
Its faults, many of them purely the faults of the moral constitution of busi-
ness, clog its progress and make it sick every little while. Some day the ethics 
of business will be universally recognized, and in that day business will be 
seen to be the oldest and most useful of all the professions.
All that the Ford industries have done—all that I have done—is to endeav-
our to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that the sort of 
business which makes the world better for its presence is a noble profession. 
Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the somewhat remark-
able progression of our enterprises—I will not say “success,” for that word 
is an epitaph, and we are just starting—is due to some accident; and that 
the methods which we have used, while well enough in their way, fit only the 
making of our particular products and would not do at all in any other line 
of business or indeed for any products or personalities other than our own.
It used to be taken for granted that our theories and our methods were fun-
damentally unsound. That is because they were not understood. Events have 
killed that kind of comment, but there remains a wholly sincere belief that 
what we have done could not be done by any other company—that we have 
been touched by a wand, that neither we nor any one else could make shoes, 
or hats, or sewing machines, or watches, or typewriters, or any other neces-
sity after the manner in which we make automobiles and tractors. And that if 
only we ventured into other fields we should right quickly discover our errors. 
I do not agree with any of this. Nothing has come out of the air. The forego-
ing pages should prove that. We have nothing that others might not have. 
We have had no good fortune except that which always attends any one who 
puts his best into his work. There was nothing that could be called “ favor-
able” about our beginning. We began with almost nothing. What we have, we 

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What We May Expect  •  243
earned, and we earned it by unremitting labour and faith in a principle. We 
took what was a luxury and turned it into a necessity and without trick or 
subterfuge. When we began to make our present motor car the country had 
few good roads, gasoline was scarce, and the idea was firmly implanted in the 
public mind that an automobile was at the best a rich man’s toy. Our only 
advantage was lack of precedent.
We began to manufacture according to a creed—a creed which was at that 
time unknown in business. The new is always thought odd, and some of us 
are so constituted that we can never get over thinking that anything which 
is new must be odd and probably queer. The mechanical working out of our 
creed is constantly changing. We are continually finding new and better 
ways of putting it into practice, but we have not found it necessary to alter 
the principles, and I cannot imagine how it might ever be necessary to alter 
them, because I hold that they are absolutely universal and must lead to a 
better and wider life for all.
If I did not think so I would not keep working—for the money that I make 
is inconsequent. Money is useful only as it serves to forward by practical 
example the principle that business is justified only as it serves, that it must 
always give more to the community than it takes away, and that unless every-
body benefits by the existence of a business then that business should not 
exist. I have proved this with automobiles and tractors. I intend to prove it 
with railways and public-service corporations—not for my personal satisfac-
tion and not for the money that may be earned. (It is perfectly impossible, 
applying these principles, to avoid making a much larger profit than if profit 
were the main object.) I want to prove it so that all of us may have more, and 
that all of us may live better by increasing the service rendered by all busi-
nesses. Poverty cannot be abolished by formula; it can be abolished only by 
hard and intelligent work. We are, in effect, an experimental station to prove 
a principle. That we do make money is only further proof that we are right. 
For that is a species of argument that establishes itself without words.