The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

The Vital Concept of Synergy
The reader who wishes to implement Ford’s “universal code” must there-
fore apply all its aspects: economic, scientific, and behavioral. Management 
cannot deny workers the fruits of their labor and expect them to respond 
with commitment, engagement, or indeed anything more than sullen 
compliance with management directives. Knowledge at Wharton (2012) 
reports,
…some employees are clearly feeling disconnected from their work. 
Among the reasons cited for this: the recession, during which companies 
laid off huge swaths of their employees with little regard for loyalty or 
length of service; a whittling away of benefits, training and promotions for 
those who remain…
The reference adds that financially healthy companies have laid off 
employees to increase the value of their stocks, so it comes as no surprise 
that employees withhold anything more than perfunctory compliance. 
When personnel departments analyze salary and wage data to figure out 
how little they can pay, they should not be surprised when employees 
reciprocate with as little effort as they can deliver. Ford (1922, p. 250) laid 
it out very explicitly: “Loyalty on the part of employees must be met by 
loyalty on the part of the employer.”
Ford’s introduction to his universal code stresses the common sense 
principle, which is all too uncommon in a society that looks to get-rich-
quick schemes like dot-com stocks and mortgage-backed securities, that 
honest effort is the only real source of material wealth.
* * *
I am now most interested in fully demonstrating that the ideas we have 
put into practice are capable of the largest application—that they have 
nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars or tractors but form something in 

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xxxii  •  Henry Ford’s Introduction
the nature of a universal code. I am quite certain that it is the natural code 
and I want to demonstrate it so thoroughly that it will be accepted, not as 
a new idea, but as a natural code.
The natural thing to do is to work—to recognize that prosperity and hap-
piness can be obtained only through honest effort. Human ills flow largely 
from attempting to escape from this natural course. I have no suggestion 
which goes beyond accepting in its fullest this principle of nature. I take it 
for granted that we must work. All that we have done comes as the result 
of a certain insistence that since we must work it is better to work intel-
ligently and forehandedly; that the better we do our work the better off we 
shall be. All of which I conceive to be merely elemental common sense.