The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

IGNORE THE NYET ENGINEERS
Chapter 1 already showed that Ford encountered (and ignored) his share 
of nyet or “no” engineers: people who were all too ready to tell him why 
something could not be done. The person who “knows” that something 
cannot be done is right, at least as far as he or her is concerned personally.
Ford’s view of these so-called experts is consistent with the Diesel 
Clothing Company’s advertising slogan, “Stupid might fail; smart doesn’t 
even try.” Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke phrased the matter some-
what more scientifically (Hughes, 1993, p. 77):
The positive recommendation has against it the most undoubted draw-
backs. The negation remains in the right, and everyone agrees to do noth-
ing. In every headquarters there are men who know how to demonstrate 
with great perception all the difficulties attending every proposed enter-
prise. The very first time something goes wrong they prove conclusively 
that they had “said so.” They are always right. Because they never counsel 
anything positive, much less carry it out; success cannot refute them. These 
men of the negative are the ruination of senior commanders.
Moltke’s “men of the negative” are equivalent to Shingo’s “nyet engi-
neers” and Yoshiki Iwata’s “concrete heads,” the latter from Womack and 
Jones (1996, pp. 128–129). These are the “experts” against whose advice 
Ford warns.
We do not, however, agree with Ford’s practice of keeping no records of 
experiments. It is important to know what has not worked in the past to 

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Getting into Production  •  69
avoid repetition of the unsuccessful approach. Ford emphatically did keep 
track of successful experiments, though, and he engaged in best practice 
deployment to make sure all his factories exploited the knowledge.
* * *
Hardly a week passes without some improvement being made somewhere 
in machine or process, and sometimes this is made in defiance of what is 
called “the best shop practice.” I recall that a machine manufacturer was 
once called into conference on the building of a special machine. The specifi-
cations called for an output of two hundred per hour.
“This is a mistake,” said the manufacturer, “you mean two hundred a 
day—no machine can be forced to two hundred an hour.”
The company officer sent for the man who had designed the machine and 
they called his attention to the specification. He said:
“Yes, what about it?”
“It can’t be done,” said the manufacturer positively, “no machine built will 
do that—it is out of the question.”
“Out of the question!” exclaimed the engineer, “if you will come down to 
the main floor you will see one doing it; we built one to see if it could be done 
and now we want more like it.”
The factory keeps no record of experiments. The foremen and superinten-
dents remember what has been done. If a certain method has formerly been 
tried and failed, somebody will remember it—but I am not particularly anx-
ious for the men to remember what someone else has tried to do in the past, 
for then we might quickly accumulate far too many things that could not be 
done. That is one of the troubles with extensive records. If you keep on record-
ing all of your failures you will shortly have a list showing that there is nothing 
left for you to try—whereas it by no means follows because one man has failed 
in a certain method that another man will not succeed.
They told us we could not cast gray iron by our endless chain method and I 
believe there is a record of failures. But we are doing it. The man who carried 
through our work either did not know or paid no attention to the previous 
figures. Likewise we were told that it was out of the question to pour the hot 
iron directly from the blast furnace into mould. The usual method is to run 
the iron into pigs, let them season for a time, and then remelt them for cast-
ing. But at the River Rouge plant we are casting directly from cupolas that 
are filled from the blast furnaces. Then, too, a record of failures—particularly 
if it is a dignified and well-authenticated record—deters a young man from 
trying. We get some of our best results from letting fools rush in where angels 
fear to tread.
None of our men are “experts.” We have most unfortunately found it nec-
essary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert—because 

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70  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who 
knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always 
pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and 
how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do 
more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment 
one gets into the “expert” state of mind a great number of things become 
impossible.
I refuse to recognize that there are impossibilities. I cannot discover that 
any one knows enough about anything on this earth definitely to say what is 
and what is not possible. The right kind of experience, the right kind of tech-
nical training, ought to enlarge the mind and reduce the number of impos-
sibilities. It unfortunately does nothing of the kind. Most technical training 
and the average of that which we call experience, provide a record of previous 
failures and, instead of these failures being taken for what they are worth, 
they are taken as absolute bars to progress. If some man, calling himself an 
authority, says that this or that cannot be done, then a horde of unthinking 
followers start the chorus: “It can’t be done.”
Take castings. Castings has always been a wasteful process and is so 
old that it has accumulated many traditions which make improvements 
extraordinarily difficult to bring about. I believe one authority on moulding 
declared—before we started our experiments—that any man who said he 
could reduce costs within half a year wrote himself down as a fraud.