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Henry Ford

Biography & Memoir

My Life and Work Audiobook Free: A Memoir Must-Listen – Free Download

Henry Ford profiles the events that shaped his personal philosophy, and the challenges he overcame on the road to founding the Ford Motor Company. Throughout his memoir, he stresses the importance of tangible service and physical production over relative value as judged by profits and money. He measures the worth of a business or government by the service it provides to all, not the profits in dollars it accumulates. He also makes the point that only service can provide for human needs, as opposed to laws or rules which can only prohibit specific actions and do not provide for the necessaries of life. Ford applies his reasoning to the lending system, transportation industry, international trade and interactions between labor and management. For each, he proposes solutions that maximize service and provide goods at the lowest cost and highest quality. He analyzes from a purely material viewpoint, going as far as to argue that the need for a good feeling in work environments may reflect a character flaw or weakness. However, his unflinching focus on the ultimate material products and necessities of life provide clever insights in how he created an efficient and flexible system for providing reliable transportation for the average person. (Summary by LivelyHive)

Biography & Memoir

Terror of the Machine Audiobook Free: Digital-Age Critique of Fordism – Free Download

In this autobiography, the American industrialist Henry Ford wrote, ‘Repetitive labor… is a terrifying prospect to a certain kind of mind… but to other minds, perhaps I might say the majority of minds, repetitive operations hold no terrors.’ Pushing the ‘efficiency of movement’ system of Frederick Winslow Taylor to its ultimate realization, Ford tirelessly toiled to reduce factory and assembly line work to its essential operations. This, in turn, reduced factory workers to automatons, seemingly nothing more than extensions of the machines for which they labored. Ford was not bothered by the prospect of reducing people to machines, since he firmly believed that it did not bother them and that they could do no better. But, paradoxically, and like all the great American industrialists, Ford feared the prospect that these ‘mindless automatons’ might get organized and demand their rights. So along with efficiency of movement came a system of indoctrination and punishment to insure that workers obeyed orders. In short, the industrialized west was built on the systematic oppression of its working people.

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