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Henry Ford and the source of our fear

Written by: Seth Godin

Article Overview: Henry Ford left us much more than cars and the highway system we built for them. He changed the world’s expectations for work. While Ford gets credit for “inventing the assembly line,” his great insight was that he understood the power of productivity.

Henry Ford and the source of our fear

Henry Ford left us much more than cars and the highway system we built for them. He changed the world’s expectations for work. While Ford gets credit for “inventing the assembly line,” his great insight was that he understood the power of productivity.

Ford was a pioneer in highly leveraged, repetitive work, done by relatively untrained workers. A farmer, with little training, could walk into Ford’s factory and become extraordinarily productive in a day or two.

This is the cornerstone of our way of life. The backbone of our economy is not brain surgeons and master violinists. It’s in fairly average people doing fairly average work.

The focus on productivity wouldn’t be relevant to this discussion except for the second thing Ford did. He decided to pay his workers based on productivity, not replacement value. This was an astonishing breakthrough. When Ford announced the $5 day (more than double the typical salary paid for this level of skill), more than 10,000 people applied for work at Ford the very next day.

Instead of paying people the lowest amount he’d need to find enough competent workers to fill the plant, he paid them more than he needed to because his systems made them so productive. He challenged his workers to be more productive so that they’d get paid more.

It meant that nearly every factory worker at Ford was dramatically overpaid! When there’s a line out the door of people waiting to take your job, weird things happen to your head. The combination of repetitive factory work plus high pay for standardized performance led to a very obedient factory floor. People were conditioned to do as they were told, and traded autonomy and craftsmanship for high pay and stability.

All of a sudden, we got used to being paid based on our output . We came, over time, to expect to get paid more and more, regardless of how long the line of people eager to take our job was. If productivity went up, profits went up. And the productive workers expected (and got) higher pay, even if there were plenty of replacement workers, eager to work for less.

This is the central conceit of our economy. People in productive industries get paid a lot even though they could likely be replaced by someone else working for less money.

This is why we’re insecure.

Obedience works fine on the well-organized, standardized factory floor. But what happens when we start using our heads, not our hands, when our collars change from blue to white?

(Excerpted from Free Prize Inside)

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Posted by Seth Godin on April 21, 2008 | Permalink | TrackBack

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Article Tags: assembly line, autonomy, backbone, breakthrough, competent workers, cornerstone, craftsmanship, ford, fords, hed, henry ford, pioneer, productive worker, productivity, profits, repetitive work, salary, violinists, way of life, weird things



Related Forum Posts
Re: YOU CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT DO IT ALONE - Hello, Yinka: A spammer posted a comment here, bumping this topic to the top again, but I had to delete the spammer's post and ban the person. However, the topic is still relevant, so let's discuss it. I like the quote from Henry Ford, posted earlier: "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." ~ Henry Ford
Re: YOU CANNOT AND SHOULD NOT DO IT ALONE - [quote="GT Bulmer":1tttnqa3]Hello, Yinka: A spammer posted a comment here, bumping this topic to the top again, but I had to delete the spammer's post and ban the person. However, the topic is still relevant, so let's discuss it. I like the quote from Henry Ford, posted earlier: "If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself." ~ Henry Ford[/quote:1tttnqa3] In Africa we have a saying that " People are my clothes, without them I am naked" So you cannot do anything alone. You just need support of people around you
Profile S?ichir? Honda next? - How about a profile on the "Japanese Henry Ford" and founder/former President of Honda Motor Co. Ltd, S?ichir? Honda?
Re: Blog sells for up to $15 million - [color=#FF0000:184yy5pe]If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself. ~Henry Ford[/color:184yy5pe]Someone must take control and recruit. There must be a "CEO"
Demo demo demo - New inventions are often difficult to explain and are better when they are demoed. When Sharon and I went on the Shopping Channel one of the key messages they always repeated was demo demo demo. A YouTube demo is a great start. You can do a dramatization to begin with. Hopefully you'll be able to get actual footage of the system in use from the video cameras of the places where it is installed. The more potential customers can experience the product, the better. Have them "break into" a demo store and let them see how powerful the product is. An actual demo will answer most of the prospective customer's questions and will give them an emotional buy-in to the product. When Henry Ford believed he had perfected his first vehicle, he took it to William H. Murphy, a lumber tycoon in Detroit, who took it for a test drive. Murphy agreed with Ford that gasoline-powered vehicles would be fueling the future and the two instantly formed a partnership that would forever change the face of the 20th century. Without that first hand experience it would have been difficult for Ford to convince Murphy about the potential of gasoline-power - it seems obvious now but at the time it was a revolutionary idea. Demo demo demo the product to get the customers experiencing the benefits first hand!


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