My Life and Work

than that which is sometimes described as the "genius for organization." This usually results in the birth of a great big chart showing, after the fashion of a family tree, how authority ramifies. T

about is already history. It takes about six weeks for the message of a man living in a berry on the lower left-hand corner of the chart to reach the president or chairman of the board, and if it ever does reach one of these august officials, it has by that time gathered to itself about a pound of crit

doing his work he will not have time to take up any other work. It is the business of those who plan the entire work to see that all of the departments are working properly toward the same end. It is not necessary to have meetings to establish good feeling bet

or it. When the work is done, then the play can come, but not before. And so the Ford factories and enterprises have no organization, no specific duties attaching to any position, no line of su

factory. Every man has to know what is going on in his sphere. I say "general superintendent." There is no such formal title. One man is in charge of the factory and has been for years. He has two men with him, who, without in any way having their duties defined, have taken particular sections of the work t

done. They do not get into trouble about the limits of authority, because they are not thinking of titles. If they had offices and all tha

kman rarely ever does so, because a foreman knows as well as he knows his own name that if he has been unjust it will be very quickly found out, and he shall no longer be a foreman. One of the things that we will not tolerate is injustice of any kind. The moment a man starts to swell with authority

n swing a job, but they are floored by a title. The effect of a title is very peculiar. It has been us

ut regard himself as importan

tisfaction among men than the fact that the title-bearers are not always the real leaders. Everybody acknowledges a real leader-a man who is fit to pla

epartments, each department under its own titular head, who in turn is surrounded by a group bearing their nice sub-titles, it is difficult to find any one who really feels responsible. Everyone knows what "passing the buck" means. The game must have originated in industrial organizations where the depar

r department. Department X, 100

on that needed more than advice to correct it. And the correction is just this-abolish the titles. A few may be legally necessary; a fe

as not been so skillfully steered as to leave much margin for pride in the steersmen. The men who bear titles now and are worth anything are forgetting their titles and are down in the foundation of busi

good in him-if he gets a chance. That is the reason we do not care in the least about a man's antecedents-we do not hire a man's history, we hire the man. If he has been in jail, that is no reason to say that he will be in jail again. I think, on the contrary, he is, if given a chance, very likely to make a special effort to keep out of jail. Our employment office does not

to start at the bottom and prove his ability. Every man's future rests solely with himself. There is far too much loose tal

t they have done, they might as well have done it badly or not have done it at all. Thus the work sometimes becomes a secondary consideration. The job in hand-the article in hand, the special kind of service in hand-turns out to be not the principal job. The main work becomes personal advancement-a platform from which to catch somebody's eye. This habit of making the work secondary and the recognition primary is unfair to the work. It makes recognition and credit the real job. And this also has an unfortunate effect on the worker. It encourages a peculiar kind of ambition which is neither lovely nor productive. It

ecially to think quickly. Such men get as far as their ability deserves. A man may, by his industry, deserve advancement, but it cannot be possibly given him unless he also has a c

I do not like to use-became fixed, so that there would be routine steps and dead men's shoes. But we have so few titles that a man who ought to be doing something better than he is doing, very soon gets to doing it-he is not restrained by the fact that there is no position ahead of him "open"-for there are no "positions." We have no cut-and-dried places-our best

an overseeing one of the principal departments started as a sweeper. There is not a single man anywhere in the factory who did not simply come in off the street. Everything that we h

ys be done better t

they do not bother about them. What they can control is the rate of production in their own departments. The rating of a department is gained by dividing the number of parts produced by the number of hands working. Every foreman checks his own department daily-he carries the figures always with him. The superintendent has a tabulation of all the scores; if there is something wrong in a department the output score shows it at once, the superintendent makes inquiries and the forem

g other than the work in hand. If he should select the people he likes instead of the

ingness to accept the additional responsibility and the additional work which goes with the higher places. Only about twenty-five per cent. are even willing to be straw bosses, and most of them take that position because it carries with it more pay than working on a machine. Men of a more mechanical turn of mind, but with no desire for responsibility, go into the t

that we do not find that to be the case. The Americans in our employ do want to go ahead, but they by no means do always want to go clear throu

ed theory-any fixed rule-it is that no job is being done well enough. The whole factory management is always open to suggestion

ted shows a saving and the cost of making the change will pay for itself within a reasonable time-say within three months-the change is made practically as of course. These changes are by no means limited to improvements which will increase production or decrease cost. A great many-perhaps most of them-are in the line of making the work easier. We do

ly four or five cuts. He was right, and a lot of money was saved in grinding. Another Pole, running a drill press, rigged up a little fixture to save handling the part after drilling. That was adopted generally and a considerable saving resulted. The men often try out litt

rs off gears, and it was a hard, nasty job. A man roughly sketched a special machine. His idea was worked out and the machine built. Now four men have several times the output of the seventeen men-and have no hard work at all to do. Changing from a solid to a

mitting waste. One of the workmen devised a very simple new method for making this gear in which the scrap was only one per cent. Again, the camshaft has to have heat treatment in order to make the surface hard; the cam shafts always came out of the heat-treat oven somewhat warped, and even b

wonder is that he hit so often. The heat treatment in the hardening of steel is highly important-providing one knows exactly the right heat to apply. That cannot be known by rule-of-thumb. It has to be measured. We

tructed or again the parts are drawn to full size on a blackboard. We are not bound by precedent but we leave nothing to luck, and we have

I think that if men are unhampered and they know that they are serving, the