Today and Tomorrow

Commemorative Edition of Ford's 1926 Classic

Henry Ford

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351408042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Winner of the 2003 Shingo Prize! Henry Ford is the man who doubled wages, cut the price of a car in half, and produced over 2 million units a year. Time has not diminished the progressiveness of his business philosophy, or his profound influence on worldwide industry. The modern printing of Today and Tomorrow features an introduction by James J.

Chapter 1

We Are Being Born Into Opportunity

For hundreds of years men have been talking about the lack of opportunity and the pressing need of dividing up things already in existence. Yet each year has seen some new idea brought forth and developed, and with it a whole new series of opportunities, until today we already have enough tested ideas which, put into practice, would take the world out of its sloughs and banish poverty by providing livings for all who will work. Only the old, outworn notions stand in the way of these new ideas. The world shackles itself, blinds its eyes, and then wonders why it cannot run!

Take just one idea — a little idea in itself — an idea that any one might have had, but which fell to me to develop — that of making a small, strong, simple automobile, to make it cheaply, and pay high wages in its making. On October 1, 1908, we made the first of our present type of small cars. On June 4, 1924, we made the ten millionth. Now, in 1926, we are in our thirteenth million.

That is interesting but perhaps not important. What is important is that, from a mere handful of men employed in a shop, we have grown into a large industry directly employing more than two hundred thousand men, not one of whom receives less than six dollars a day. Our dealers and service stations employ another two hundred thousand men. But by no means do we manufacture all that we use. Roughly, we buy twice as much as we manufacture, and it is safe to say that two hundred thousand men are employed on our work in outside factories. This gives a rough total of six hundred thousand employees, direct and indirect, which means that about three million men, women, and children get their livings out of a single idea put into effect only eighteen years ago. And this does not take into account the great number of people who in some way or other assist in the distribution or the maintenance of these cars. And this one idea is only in its infancy!

These figures are given not with any thought of boastfulness. I am not talking about a specific person or business. I am talking about ideas. And these figures do show something of what a single idea can accomplish. These people require food, clothing, shoes, houses, and so on. If they and their families were brought together in one place and those needed to supply their wants gathered around them, we should have a city larger than New York. All this has matured in less time than a child matures. What nonsense it is to think or speak of a lack of opportunity! We do not know what opportunity is.

There are always two kinds of people in the world — those who pioneer and those who plod. The plodders always attack the pioneers. They say that the pioneers have gobbled up all the opportunity, when, as a plain matter of fact, the plodders would have nowhere to plod had not the pioneers first cleared the way.

Think about your work in the world. Did you make your place or did someone make it for you? Did you start the work you are in or did someone else? Have you ever found or made an opportunity for yourself or are you the beneficiary of opportunity which others have found or made?

We have seen the rise of a temper which does not want opportunities — it wants the full fruits of opportunity handed to it on a platter. This temper is not American. It is imported from lands and by races that have never been able to see or use opportunity — that have existed on what was given them.

Now the fact is that a generation ago there were a thousand men to every opportunity while today there are a thousand opportunities for every man. Affairs in this country have changed just that much.

However, when industry was growing up, opportunities were limited. Men saw along one track and all of them wanted to get on that one track. Naturally, some of them were shoved off; there were more men than opportunities. That is why we had so much fierceness and cruelty of competition in the old days. There were not enough of the big opportunities to go around.

But, with the maturing of industry, a whole new world of opportunity opened up. Think how many doors of creative activity every industrial advance has opened. It has turned out, through all the fierce competitive fights, that now man could succeed in his own opportunity without creating many times more opportunities than he could begin to grasp.

It is almost impossible to understand the rise of industry without recognizing the former scarcity of opportunity. Some forms of business seem to have gone onward, but our accounts of them mostly come from those who were beaten.

But there is enough of fact to indicate that, when industry was being evolved under the pressure of the people’s needs (and that is the only force that brought it into being), some men had large vision while others had limited vision. The men of larger vision naturally bested the others. Their methods were sometimes immoral, but it was not their immoral methods that accounted for their success — it was their larger vision of needs, and ways and means to fulfill them. There must be a tremendous amount of right vision in anything if it is to survive dishonest or cruel methods. To attribute success to dishonesty is a common fallacy. We hear of men “too honest to succeed.” That may be a comforting reflection to them, but it is never the reason for their failure.

Dishonest men do sometimes succeed. But only when they give a service which exceeds their dishonesty. Honest men sometimes fail because they lack other essential qualities to go with their honesty. It is safe to say that in the success of men who are dishonest, all that is touched by dishonesty sloughs off.

Those who do not believe in opportunity will still find places within the opportunities that others have created; those who cannot direct their work successfully will always find it possible to be directed by others.

But are we moving too fast — not merely in the making of automobiles, but in life generally? One hears a deal about the worker being ground down by hard labour, of what is called progress being made at the expense of something or other, and that efficiency is wrecking all the finer things of life

It is quite true that life is out of balance — and always has been. Until lately, most people have had no leisure to use and, of course, they do not now know how to use it. One of our large problems is to find some balance between work and play, between sleep and food, and eventually to discover why men grow ill and die. Of this more later.

Certainly we are moving faster than before. Or, more correctly, we are being moved faster. But is twenty minutes in a motor car easier or harder than four hours’ solid trudging down a dirt road? Which mode of travel leaves the pilgrim fresher at the end? Which leaves him more time and more mental energy? And soon we shall be making in an hour by air what were days’ journeys by motor. Shall we all then be nervous wrecks?

But does this state of nervous wreckage to which we are all said to be coming exist in life — of in books? One hears of the workers’ nervous exhaustion in books, but does one hear of it from the workers?

Go to the people who are working with the actual things of the world, from the labourer traveling to his work on the street car to the young man who hops across a continent in a day. You will find quite a different attitude. Instead of cringing away from what has come, they are looking with eager expectancy toward what is coming. Always they are willing to scrap today in favour of tomorrow. That is the blessedness of the active man, the man who is not sitting alone in a library trying to fit the new world into the old moulds. Go to the labourer in the street car. He will tell you that just a few years ago he came home so late and so tired that he had no time to change his clothes — just got his supper and went to bed. Now he changes his clothes at the shop, goes home by daylight, has an early supper, and takes the family out for a drive. He will tell you that the killing pressure has let up. A man may have to be a little more businesslike on the job than formerly, but the old endless, exhausting drive has quit.

The men at the top, the men who are changing all these things, will tell you the same. They are not breaking down. They are marching the way progress is going and find it easier to go along with progress than to try to hold things back.

And just there is the secret: those who get headaches are trying to hold the world back, trying to wrap it up again in their small definitions. It cannot be done.

The very word “efficiency” is hated because so much that is not efficiency has masqueraded as such. Efficiency is merely the doing of work in the best way you know rather than in the worst way. It is the taking of a trunk up a hill on a truck rather than on one’s back. It is the training of the worker and the giving to him of power so that he may earn more and have more and live more comfortably. The Chinese coolie working through long hours for a few cents a day is not happier than the American workman with his own home and automobile. The one is a slave, the other is a free man.

In the organization of the Ford work we are continually reaching out for more and more developed power. We go to the coalfields, to the streams, and to the rivers, always seeking some cheap and convenient source of power which we can transform into electricity, take to the machine, increase the output of the workers, raise their wages, and lower the price to the public.

Into this train of events enter a great and ever-increasing number of factors. You must get the most out of the power, out of the material, and out of the time. This has taken us apparently far afield, as, for instance, into railroading, mining, lumbering, and shipping. We have spent many millions of dollars just to save a few hours’ time here and there. Actually, however, we do nothing whatsoever which is not directly connected with our business — which is the making of motors.

The power which we use in manufacturing produces another power — the power of the motor that goes into the automobile. About fifty dollars’ worth of raw material is transformed into twenty horsepower mounted on wheels. Up to December 1, 1925, we had, through cars and tractors, added to the world nearly three hundred million mobile horsepower, or about ninety-seven times the potential horsepower of Niagara Falls. The whole world uses only twenty-three million stationary horsepower, of which the United States uses more than nine million.

The effect of putting all this additional developed power into the country is something we do not yet know how to reckon with, but I am convinced that the remarkable prosperity of the United States is in a large part due to this added horsepower, which, by freeing the movements of men, also frees and awakens their thoughts.

The progress of the world has been in direct ration to the convenience of communication. We have remade this country with automobiles. But we do not have these automobiles because we are prosperous. We are prosperous because we have them. You will remember that everyone did not buy them all at once. The buying has been gradual — in fact, we have never been able to keep up with orders, and with our present capacity of two million a year we are able to meet the needs only of our present owners if they should each buy a new car every six years.

That is an aside. The general prosperity of the country, in spite of bad farm years, is in direct proportion to the number of automobiles. That is inevitable, for you cannot introduce such a vast amount of developed power into a country without the effects being felt in every direction. What the motor car does among other things, quite apart from its own usefulness, is to familiarize people generally with the use of developed power — to teach what power is and to get them about and out of the shells in which they have been living. Before the motor car many a man lived and died without ever having been more than fifty miles from home. That is of the past in this country. It is still true of much of the world. When the representatives of Russia came to buy tractors for their state farms, we told them:

“No, you first ought to buy automobiles and get your people used to machinery and power and to moving about with some freedom. The motor cars will bring roads, and then it will be possible to get the products of your farms to the cities.”

They followed the advice and bought some thousands of automobiles. Now, after several years, they have bought some thousands of tractors.

The great point in all this, however, is not that an automobile or anything else may be well and cheaply made through planning and the use of power. We have known that for a long time. The automobile is particularly important for the reasons that have been given, but what overshadows all else in importance is that we have discovered a new motive for industry and abolished the meaningless terms “capital,” “labour,” and “public.”

For many years we have heard the phrase “profit motive,” which meant that someone called a capitalist provided tools and machinery, employed men — that is, labour — at the least possible wage, and then manufactured goods and sold them to some strange collection of people known as the “public.” The capitalist sold to this public at the highest price he could get and pocketed his profits. Apparently, the public came out of the air and also got its money out of the air, and it had to be protected from the profiteering capitalist. The workman also had to be protected, and someone invented the “living-wage” notion. All of which grows out of a complete misconception of the entire industrial process.

It is true that petty business can work on the capital-labour-public mistake, but big business cannot, nor can little business grow big on the theory that it can grind down its employees. The plain fact is that the public which buys from you does not come from nowhere. The owner, the employees, and the buying public are all one and the same, an unless and industry can so manage itself as to keep wages high and prices low, it destroys itself, for otherwise it limits the number of its customers.

One’s own employees ought to be one’s own best customers.

The real progress of our company dates from 1914, when we raised the minimum wage from somewhat more that two dollars to a flat five dollars a day, for then we increased the buying power of our own people, and they increased the buying power of other people, and so on and so on. It is this thought of enlarging buying power by paying high wages and selling at low prices which is behind the prosperity of this country.

It is the fundamental motive of our company. We call it the “wage motive.”

But, of course, high wages cannot be paid to any one just for the asking. If wages are raised without lowering costs, then buying power is not enlarged. There is no “living wage,” for, unless an equivalent in work is returned, no wages can be high enough for a man to live on them. And also there can be no “standard” wage. No one on this earth knows enough to fix a standard wage. The very idea of a standard wage presupposes that invention and management have reached their limit.

No greater injury can be done to a man than to pay him a high wage for a small amount of work, for then his high wage increases the prices of commodities and puts them beyond his reach. Also it is untrue to say that profits or the benefit of inventions which bring lower costs belong to the worker. That grows out of another misconception of the industrial process. Profits belong primarily to the business and the workers are only a part of the business. If all the profits were given to the workers, then improvements, such as will hereafter be described, would not be possible. Prices would increase, and consumption would decline, and the business would gradually go out of existence. The profits have to go toward making lower costs, and the advantage of lower costs must in a large measure be given to the consumer. This, in effect, is the same as raising wages.

This may seem complex, but it has worked out rather simply with us.

To effect the economies, to bring in the power, to cut out the waste, and thus fully to realize the wage motive, we must have big business — which does not, however, necessarily mean centralized business. We are decentralizing.

Any business founded on the wage motive and animated solely with the thought of service must grow big. It cannot grow to a certain size and be held there — it must go forward or go back. Of course, what seems to be a big business may be created overnight by buying up a large number of small businesses. The result may be big business, or again, it may just be a museum of business, showing how many curious things may be bought with money. Big business is not money power: it is service power.

Big business happens to signify the means by which the people of the United States make their living. All our business, into however many pieces it may be broken, is inevitably big. This is a big country, with a big population having big needs and calling for big production and big supply. You cannot name the most trivial commodity that is not in this country an enormously big industry. Even more bicycles are being made than at the height of the bicycle craze. And business must grow bigger and bigger, else we shall have insufficient supplies and high prices.

Take the case of the farmers of Sudbury, Massachusetts, less ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Publisher’s Message
• Foreword
• Introduction to the Anniversary Edition
• About Henry Ford
• Ford Chronology
• Chapter 1 We Are Being Born Into Opportunity
• Chapter 2 Is There A Limit To Big Business?
• Chapter 3 Big Business And The Money Power
• Chapter 4 Are Profits Wrong?
• Chapter 5 It Can’t Be Done
• Chapter 6 Learning By Necessity
• Chapter 7 What Are Standards?
• Chapter 8 Learning From Waste
• Chapter 9 Reaching Back To The Sources
• Chapter 10 The Meaning Of Time
• Chapter 11 Saving The Timber
• Chapter 12 Turning Back To Village Industry
• Chapter 13 Wages, Hours, And The Wage Motive
• Chapter 14 The Meaning Of Power
• Chapter 15 Educating For Life
• Chapter 16 Curing Or Preventing
• Chapter 17 Making A Railroad Pay
• Chapter 18 The Air
• Chapter 19 Farm Problems Are Farm Problems
• Chapter 20 Finding The Balance In Life
• Chapter 21 What Is Money For?
• Chapter 22 Applying The Principles To Any Business
• Chapter 23 The Wealth Of Nations
• Chapter 24 Why Not?
• Index