My Life and Work

Henry Ford published this in 1922 with Samuel Crowther, at the height of the Model T's dominance, as a statement of his industrial philosophy. It combines autobiography with an argument about what manufacturing is for.

Ford's economic claim is that the purpose of business is to produce more goods at lower prices, that prices should be cut before costs are known to be reducible in order to force the organisation to find the reductions, and that wages should be high because workers are also customers. He describes the five-dollar day introduced in 1914 as a business decision rather than charity, arguing that it reduced turnover, raised productivity and expanded the market. He describes the moving assembly line, the standardisation of parts, the elimination of unnecessary motion, and his hostility to inventory, which he treated as money doing nothing.

He is contemptuous of finance, of accountants, of experts and of anyone who studies a problem rather than trying things. He argues that a business should be financed from its own earnings and never from banks, on the grounds that lenders will eventually control it. The book contains no acknowledgement of the human cost of the line, of the Sociological Department's surveillance of workers' private lives, or of the Service Department's violence against organising. Ford's antisemitism, published elsewhere in the same period, does not appear here but is part of the record. Read it as a primary document of mass production doctrine, stated by the person who did most to establish it.