My Life and Work

Every young aspiring person in any field of life ought to read this. Although "Henry Ford" was the "automobile man", his thoughts in regards to work, money, success, prestige etc are so unique, so inspiring and so visionary that reading this book becomes a must. It marvels me to no end that all these thoughts Henry Ford had envisioned and actually practiced about 100 years before today. .. Ford was a practical man. He had contempt for mere theorists and perhaps rightly so. For any knowledge is useless if it can't be brought to everyday practice. .. Well, Ford was a genius and mankind owes a great deal to him for the kind of convenience and prosperity it enjoys today. Ford invented the modern age and transformed the way Humanity lives forever. My humble tribute to the great man forever.!! A must read book.

One of the best autobiographies I had ever read. As an individual giving more importance to my own ideas and individuality at every time I fell in love with Henry Ford to see a man of ideas and individuality. It is not just an autobiography but I showed how a man had a larger perspective about business - 'Business is not a money maker it is a service render.' One sentence in this book clearly explains what Henry Ford's meant by service render - 'One year our business produced profits more than we ever expected, even after giving a bonus to all workers, profits weighed very much high. So we returned 50 dollars to every customer who bought our cars and cut all the car prices by 50 dollars making it affordable by every person irrespective of his financial status.'

It takes rare talent to pursue the dream to serve masses. This man has it. Let us benefit from his experience and vision. This book is a lesson to be productive.

The quality of the pages is what you pay for. But the book is a fascinating read. You get engrossed in how one man defined quality, quantity and how industry links these two. From catering, politicians, businessmen and entrepreneurs, this book is a worthwhile read for you.

Good for Reading & find some business Thoughts, but it's too Boring to read. I actually buy this book after reading Steve Jobs biography which was far better than this book. I'm not saying that this book is bad but in my case I'm get bored. Otherwise everyone should read this book because You shouldn't Judge any Books by it's cover.

Henry ford is a living embodiment of how an ideal business man should be. His views are extraordinary and represent a great developed mind beyond comprehension. His ideas and methods should be followed by everyone.

I have read it & my experience become more apparent to see business. Good book for new start-up. Many things to learn from this books.

He had favorable ambitions for people around him. He is passionate. He is an intelligent millionaire, bold, tendency to improve, great author.

This book is less an autobiography than an education in business and economics with a unique philosophy. It is a great mirror to hold up to our current business practices and economic life. Reading between the lines, it is a warning to the leveraged buyout crowd and an incentive to our economic policy makers to think again. Henry Ford has been much ridiculed and vilified. True, he was critical of much and expressed himself very strongly. He was anti-Semitic. This was not unusual in his day. This book has none of that, but you can see one source of his enmity – the banks. Then, as now, the Jewish participation in commercial and investment banks was very pronounced. Ford felt that allowing bankers in led to a loss of control and running a business in a way far different from his philosophy. He was not very positive about lawyers either. Henry Ford is also admired for the “assembly line” system of manufacturing, which he admits he got from observing a slaughterhouse operation. Ford is also known for going a long time without changing models and lowering his prices (along what we now call the learning curve). He looked for constant manufacturing and engineering improvement (what the Japanese call “kaizen”). Also, like the Japanese in later generations, he pioneered “just in time” inventories. His goal was to supply simple high quality products at prices anyone could afford. Meanwhile, he raised the average worker’s wages to unprecedented heights and instituted companywide “social services” and a unique brand of vocational education for the young. In many ways he was neither a capitalist nor conservative. Rather he was a progressive thinker for his time and a “distributivist” rather than a socialist. One might wonder whether his philosophy, if generally implemented, would have prevented the slew of economic and industrial problems experienced since the 1930s, but it certainly justifies listening to his views and considering them seriously. Autobiography is not missing here. I enjoyed Ford’s description of his friendships with Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and the naturalist John Burroughs. I recall being taught in school or elsewhere that Ford was a poor farm boy who became a mechanic and invented a car in his garage. This is misleading. His father was an affluent farmer who gave his son a nice farm eventually. Ford did not like farm work and always was looking for ways to do things efficiently. This led him to mechanics and he was not like your corner garage mechanic. He became interested in gasoline engines and perfecting them. He was more what we would call a machinist. Moreover, through self-study and practice he became what we would call an engineer. He held responsible management jobs with a steam tractor company and Detroit Edison. While doing these things he tinkered on his own time with his original automobiles. His forward thinking is illustrated by his thoughts on why corn should be used to make “tractor fuel.” Sounds pretty modern to the ethanol crowd. My only problem with this book is that the paragraphs are too darn long, but that's the way folks used to write. I came away from this book with a renewed interest in Ford, a fascinating personality. His thoughts and “credo” about business and society and the proper place of the industrialist are well worth knowing and considering. They are as relevant today as 100 years ago. If you are in business management there is even more to think about and compare with what is taught in today’s business schools. If you worry about a world awash in debt and influenced by “bankers” and leveraged buy-out artists this book will give you more food for thought.

Thoughts of one of the greatest. Long sighted man, with a valuable understanding of what true business is…. a fair service to others.

While the title reads life and work, for the author this meant more or less work is life. In a way it is an old school biography - in this case focused mostly on the company in question, rather than the author himself - in the same vein as Hilton's Be My Guest . It is also very much focusing on the principles of management that Henry Ford believed in, and is in that way a great complement to Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors - something worthwhile reading for anyone interested in or working in the automotive industry (and interested in management more broadly, as well). A lot of the moves Ford made from the start at the turn of last century to the meteoric rise and peak in the early 1920's, when the book was written are described in the book, with the logic behind it laid out. You will be able to read about the $5 workday, the constant quest for production efficiency improvement, the practical (and not from forged results, like with Taylor) results of scientific management, the production line, the constant lowering of prices for the product, following efficiency gains, the mechanisation of agriculture, etc. Some, such as the introduction of the production line and the $5 a day salary are relatively well known, the rest perhaps less so and what the book does relatively well is show how the system works well holistically and what is needed in order to implement it. On top of describing production, quite some attention is being devoted to other aspects of business, which Ford considered peripheral, misused and generally badly run - such as financing, hedging, transport, law, etc. In his view the finance aspects and departments even in his day were overemphasised and one can easily see how the efficiency based system he was striving for would be hard to implement in a company where the owner / CEO does not have the ultimate control - stock markets as well as shareholders would be fairly unlikely to support the low dividend and low article profitability (compensated by a meteoric rise in sales leading to an extremely solid profitability overall) back then as well as now. His basic message being that more money will not prevent bad management, rather it will perpetuate it, removing the urgency and need for more fundamental operative changes. He also warns agains hedging (raw materials, currency etc.) - in his view, when a business makes a killing in those areas a couple of times, the temptation is great to focus the effort here rather than on production or the delivery of goods and services, something likely to lead to decline in the longer term (he did not believe it is consistently possible to beat the market). The book is also surprising if one looks at when it was written - many later authors seem to have borrowed extremely heavily from it. Ayn Rand ( Atlas Shrugged (Penguin Modern Classics) , The Fountainhead (Penguin Modern Classics) ) appears to have taken on many ideas - although her disdain for the common man is not shared by Ford (he is much more egalitarian in this respect - i.e. people have different capabilities but it is also the responsibility of the management and the people with abilities to make sure the rest fulfill their potential). The stock and flow framework of Jay Forrester's System Dynamics (as introduced by the author in his book Industrial Dynamics ) is described here (decades earlier), too. He also seems to have predated Colin Chapman's (of Lotus fame) obsession of adding lightness to everything by about 5 decades. As for the style, Ford does not necessarily write for readability - it will be much closer to works of his time in this respect, more of a Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford World's Classics) than the work of a late 20th century management guru. Still, it is not a real chore to read, it just requires a bit more concentration. Finally, it is interesting to see how the system he devised and operated so effectively for about two decades was replaced and enriched by Sloan's version of mass customisation, something Ford was forced to adapt but a few brief years after the book was written. If you are interested in how some of Ford's ideas evolved (and degenerated) later on, I can also warmly recommend Sloan's My Years with General Motors for the next stage of development, Dewar's A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry's Self-Destruction for the complete brakdown of relations between labour and management (also at Ford), and either DeLorean's On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. De Lorean's Look Inside the Automotive Giant or Yates' The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry for the final stages of cancerous development / subversion of Ford's and Sloan's earlier ideas.

Gostei muito deste livro. A filosofia de Henry Ford era bem sofisticada para a época e até mesmo para os dias de hoje. Sua exaltação do serviço ao cliente e uma política agressiva de preço baixo dos produtos para que todos tenham acesso a eles é louvável! Sua visão humanista do trabalhador ter acesso aos bens produzidos, o crescimento profissional por mérito e o trabalho de deficientes físicos na linha de produção é brilhante! Gostei bastante, sendo muito esclarecedor para mim.

この本は、新しく組み直しているので、オリジナルにあった写真も全部抜け落ちているし、表組みや箇条書きの書式も違和感があります。この本よりも、1922年に出版されたオリジナルを写真製版したものが、ミシガン大学図書館のコレクションのリプリントとして出ているので、そちらをお勧めします。