My Life and Work

Ford opens his book with a claim that sounds odd coming from a man his cars had made enormously rich. Power and machinery, money and goods, "are useful only as they set us free to live." They are means to an end, and he asks to be judged by that end.

He is blunt about his own position. If all he wanted was money, the system of 1922 suited him perfectly; it was paying him in plenty. He objects to it anyway, because it encourages every kind of waste.

So the cars are not the point. He calls them concrete evidence of a theory of business, and the company's huge success matters to him only as proof that the theory works. Read everything that follows that way: not a story of getting rich, but a method with its evidence attached.

If his business rests on a single principle, Ford says, it is this: "The principal part of a chisel is the cutting edge."

A chisel can be forged from splendid steel and beautifully finished, and if it has no edge it is not a chisel. It is just a piece of metal. Take the image out of the workshop and it becomes a rule: what a thing does, not what it is supposed to do, is what matters.

Then he pushes it one step further. Why put tremendous force behind a blunt chisel when a light blow on a sharp one will do the work? The chisel is there to cut, not to be hammered. Any force beyond what the job actually needs is simply waste.

Ford finds the cutting edge in two places, and both apply to anyone who runs anything.

In merchandising, the edge is the point where the product touches the consumer. An unsatisfactory product has a dull edge, and a great deal of wasted effort is needed to put it through. In the factory, the edge is the man and the machine on the job. If the man is not right, the machine cannot be; if the machine is not right, the man cannot be.

When a project needs more and more pushing just to keep moving, most people ask how to push harder. Ford's question is a different one, and far cheaper to answer: where did the edge go dull?

In Ford's chisel image, where is the cutting edge of selling?

• In the sales force that persuades a hesitant buyer
• In the quality of the steel and the care of the forging
• At the point where the product touches the consumer✓Correct answer
• In the price advantage a firm holds over its rivals

Ford puts the edge exactly where the product meets the person using it. Persuasion belongs to the hammering: the duller the product, the more force it takes to push it through. And fine steel without an edge, he says, is just a piece of metal.

Ford's own summary of his idea fits in a line: waste and greed block the delivery of true service. Both, he insists, are unnecessary.

He diagnoses them differently. Waste comes largely from not understanding what one does, or from doing it carelessly. Greed he treats as a kind of nearsightedness: less a sin than a failure to look far enough ahead.

That second diagnosis is the one worth sitting with. A preacher says greed is wrong. Ford says greed is short-sighted, which is a harsher charge against a businessman, because it means the greedy man is bad at the very thing he is trying to do.

Ford had just watched it happen. In the boom after the war, orders came without effort, and the merchant began to behave as though he were doing the customer a favour by selling to him. Some called that prosperity. Ford called it a needless money chase.

During the boom, he says, production mostly served itself. When the public woke up to the fact that it was not being served, many producers went to smash and announced a "period of depression". Ford is unmoved: they had simply tried to pit nonsense against sense.

His conclusion is the line people remember: "Being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it." Serve for the sake of service, and money abundantly takes care of itself.