Posts Tagged ‘ Henry Ford ’
Standardization is often seen as a rival to innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Henry Ford would not agree with that assessment.
If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.
—Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow
Henry Ford compares the freedom and dignity of an employee to that of a businessman and finds the life of a businessman sometimes inferior to that of an employee:
I am sometimes asked whether it is better to go into business for oneself, or to take employment. Employment as a career competes with private business in a way which few realize. Employment now offers a career such as men sought in their own business and often failed to attain. The very growth of business has tended to give employment a status which even business ownership did not have fifty years ago. A great deal of nonsense had been written about the freedom of the workman under the old system. The old-time guild system held nothing of the ideal. The union rules and repressive tradition of that system weighed heavily alike upon master and man, and led to little satisfaction for the individual and to no prosperity for society.
—Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow
It is still fashionable for employees to dream of striking out on their own, while those who actually run businesses would cast off the cares of accounting and compliance and making payroll and marketing to focus on practicing their trade and serving customers.
Perhaps it is just another case of the grass always being greener on the other side.
But who has greater potential for fulfillment? The employee who can engage in work they have passion for while (relatively) unencumbered by mundane business cares, or the business owner who is struggling with sales or taxes or accounting and barely has time to think about their primary service?
There is potential for fulfillment, as well as risk, in either path.
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!
—Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow
