Perspective:
Great Minds Series / Henry Ford

“Business on a money making basis is insecure. It is a touch and go affair, moving irregularly and rarely over a term of years amounting to much. It is the function of business to produce for consumption and not for money or speculation. Producing for consumption implies that the quality of the article produced will be high and that the price will be low - that the article be one which serves the people and not merely the producer. If the money feature is twisted out of its proper perspective, then the production will be twisted to serve the producer.”

“The producer depends for his prosperity upon serving the people. He may get by for a while serving himself, but if he does it will be purely accidental, and when the people wake up to the fact that they are not being served, the end of that producer is in sight. During the boom period the larger effort of production was to serve itself and hence, the moment the people woke up, many producers went to smash. They said that they had entered a “Period of Depression”. Really they had not. They were simply trying to pit nonsense against sense which is something that cannot successfully be done. Being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of service - for the satisfaction of doing that which one believes to be right - then money abundantly takes care of itself”.

“Money comes naturally as a result of service”

“But what business ever started with the manufacturer and ended with the consumer? Where does the money to make the wheels go round come from? From the consumer of course. And success in manufacture is based solely upon an ability to serve that consumer to his liking. He may be served by quality or he may be served by price. He is best served at the highest quality at the lowest price, and any man who can give to the consumer the highest quality at the lowest price is bound to be a leader in business, whatever the kind of article he makes. There is no getting away from this”.

“Then why flounder around waiting for good business? Get the costs down by better management. Get the prices down to the buying power.”.

“Regarding the above Ford quotes. This is exactly what I meant when I said we are determined to figure out how to build serious multi-layered business systems as fast and as cheaply as possible”.

“We already have as one of our product principles that it be of the highest quality”.

“Now I am not outlining the career of the Ford Motor Company for any personal reason. I am not saying: Go thou and do likewise. What I am trying to emphasize is that the ordinary way of doing business is not the best way. I am coming to the point of my entire departure from ordinary methods. From this point dates the extraordinary success of the company”.

“Plan day and night, probably for years, on something which will best suit the public, and then how it should be made”.

“Standardization (to use the word as I understand it) is not just taking one’s best selling article and concentrating on it. It is planning day and night and probably for years, first on something which will best suit the public and then on how it should be made. The exact processes of manufacturing will develop by themselves. Then, if we shift the manufacturing from the profit to the service basis, we shall have a real business in which profits will be all that anyone could desire”.

“All of this seems self-evident to me. It is the logical basis of any business that wants to serve 95% of the community. It is the logical way in which a community can serve itself. I cannot comprehend why all business does not go on this basis. All that has to be done in order to adopt it is to overcome the habit of grabbing at the newest dollar as though it were the only dollar in the world.”

“Everybody knows that it is always possible to do a thing better the second time. I do not know why manufacturing should not at that time have generally recognized. This as a basic fact - unless it might be that the manufacturers were in such a hurry to obtain something to sell that they did not take the time for adequate preparation. Making “to order” instead of making in volume is, I suppose, a habit of tradition, that has descended from the old handicraft days. Ask a hundred people how they want a particular article made. About eighty will not know; they will leave it to you. Fifteen will think they must say something while five will really have preferences and reasons. The ninety-five, made up of those who do not know and admit it and the fifteen who do not know but do not admit it constitute the real market for any product. The five who want something special may or may not be able to pay the price for special work. If they have the price, they can get the work, but they constitute a special and limited market. Of the ninety-five perhaps perhaps ten or fifteen will pay the price for quality. Their numbers are thinning with each day. Buyers are learning how to buy. The majority will consider and buy the biggest dollar’s worth of quality. If therefore, you discover what will give the ninety-five percent of people the best all-round service and then arrange to manufacture at the very lowest price, you will be meeting a demand that is so large that it may be called universal.”

“The most surprising feature of business as it was conducted was the large attention given to finance and the small attention given to service. That seemed to me to be reversing the natural process which is that money should come as a result of work and not before the work. The second feature was the general indifference to better methods of manufacture as long as whatever was done got by and took the money. In other words, an article apparently was not built with reference to how greatly it could serve the public but with reference solely to how much money could be had for it - and without any particular care whether the customer was satisfied. To sell him was enough. A dissatisfied customer was regarded not as a man whose trust had been violated, but either as a nuisance or as a possible source of more money in fixing up the work that ought to have been done right in the first place.

“Waste is due largely to not understanding what one does”

“The essence of my idea then is that waste and greed block the delivery of true service. Both waste and greed are unnecessary. Waste is due largely to not understanding what one does, or being careless in doing of it. Greed is merely a species of near sightedness”.

“You will note that the financiers proposed to cure by lending money and not by bettering methods. They did not suggest putting in an engineer; They wanted to put in a treasurer.

“And that is the danger of having bankers in business. They think solely in terms of money. They think of a factory as making money, not goods. They want to watch the money, not the efficiency of production. They cannot comprehend that a business never stands still, it must go forward or back. They regard a reduction in prices as a throwing away of profit, instead of as a building of a business”.

“It is not good management to take profits out of the workers or the buyers; make management produce the profits. Don’t cheapen the product: don’t cheapen the wage: don’t overcharge the public. Put brains into the method, and more brains, and still more brains - do things better than ever before; and by thls means all parties to business are served and benefitted”

“We are just like him. This is exactly the way we think and believe. Not only were we raised this way, I came to these conclusions on my own through experience over time. It is not only right ethically and perhaps morally right. It is common sense and win, win, win for the producer, the consumer, and greater society. Companies that lose this, possibly as a result of the founder, visionary being drunk or corrupted by success, wealth or power. Or if the founding visionary leaves or is displaced by self-serving individuals, the results are catastrophic and what was a win,win,win becomes a lose,lose,lose for all”.

“It is our time, it is our moment…We are doing it right, not because we are told to do so, but because we know it is the only way to conduct ourselves and do the right thing”.

“We, theHub have the Cure…not just the technology (but also) the processes. The emphasis on processes is extremely important. In any business the technology defines the processes, and the processes define the business. Therefore to transform the processes of a business is to transform the business”.

“We are not selling the technology. We are transforming the processes of each business we treat (treatment), thereby enabling them to be far more successful”