My Life and Work Paperback – April 23, 2017

My 15-year-old son read this book for freshman year History class (home school). This is his review:"The title of this book, My Life and Work, would be better titled, My Work and Ideals. There is very little in this book about Ford himself. If you’re looking for a book about events in Henry Ford’s life, look somewhere else. He spends most of the book discussing the best way to run a business, and how these methods were put to use in the Ford Motor Company.In addition, I found this book very redundant in some ways. Ford spends a chapter on each of the aspects of running a business, and how it was done at the Ford Motor Company. The ideals used in each of the chapters are really all the same, just applied in different scenarios. You could just read the first chapter of this book and save yourself the time of reading the whole thing; you’d get almost as much out of it.Also I have to say that the font in this book is horrible! I don’t know about the hard cover, but the paper back’s font is super squished and hard to read. If you want to read this book I recommend that you get a different copy with normal print so you can read it more easily.If you want a look inside Henry Ford’s head get this book! However, if you’re looking for a book about his life and the events therein, there’s a better book for you!"

Henry Ford was a man of vision and conviction. A man who in many ways was ahead of his time. He delved and embraced many areas of life and it's commitments and responsibilities. He believed in hard work, personal goals and gave an explicit road map for anyone of ambition to follow. He disavowed laziness and the tendency to lazy thinking. His book is more far reaching than just manufacturing cars on a volume basis; it delves into what a man should set forth as a general commitment to the entire approach to how one can lead a successful and honorable life. Must read.

Reading this book has been a life changing experience for me.Henry Ford begins by laying out his background (which he'll keep smattering here & there).Then he gets into the meat of the book which is plotting his journey from the kernel of an idea to execution and ultimate growth.The majority of the book is him sharing his worldview on manufacturing & business best practices. If you're an entrepreneur then I assure you that you'll be taken to dizzying heights at this point.The thrust of the book is that you get to see patterns of timeless business principles that still apply today.Henry Fore of course also shares his philosophy on society, governance & capitalism. I honestly skipped some of these segments that kept droning on.The one big takeaway that has altered my entrepreneurial mind is this: Business doesn't exist for profit first. It exists to serve mankind & by doing so makes more than it ever could while focused solely on profitability.He gives illustration after illustration of how the Ford motor company would continually work to lower price each year to make the car accessible & in doing so grow to great heights. A total contradiction to today's greedy company cultures.This book shout be on your shelf or read list. Definitely taking another run at it.

This book was a disappointment to me, particularly since I admire the man and his accomplishments—especially early in his career—and that of the Motor Company. I had hoped for a more detailed historical, objective perspective of Ford Motor Company under the reins of Henry Ford during that early period; instead, this book was largely a rambling, (at times self-aggrandizing), account of his stubborn business concepts and ideology and "Ford" way of doing business.Nevertheless, Ford was very innovative with such things as the $5/day wage for workers during 1914, but this was done largely to hold on to workers rather than experience constant turnover in workers. On the other hand, Henry Ford saw nothing wrong with the Model T, and he was very reluctant to migrate to the newer and more sophisticated Model A in the early 1930s, eventually forced to make that change by a falling market share and downturn in business.One interesting anecdote regarding Henry Ford's stubbornness: in a (great) car book, *The Birth of Chrysler Corporation,* written by Carl Breer of Chrysler, an account was given about the late-20s introduction of the new Plymouth. In this account, Walter Chrysler and his three engineering directors decided to visit Henry Ford to show off the new Plymouth with it high-compression engine, 4-wheel hydraulic brakes, all-steel body, etc., to share these engineering milestones with the great Mr. Ford, a friend of Walter Chrysler. After a tour of the Ford facility and lunch featuring carrot pie (Ford's favorite pie), a ride in the Plymouth was arranged for HF. Relatively unimpressed but polite, Henry Ford and the others returned to the plant. At the end of the visit, Walter Chrysler gave the Plymouth keys to Ford as a gift, and the Chrysler men rode back to Detroit in a cab.Ironically, all of these Chrysler's pioneering-engineering firsts eventually found their way into Ford cars. Yet because of Henry Ford's stubbornness and "do-it-my-way-or-the-highway" mentality, Chrysler overtook Ford in sales around 1929 and held on to No. 2 in the industry until 1950.Overall, there are probably many other books other than *My Life and Work* that would better fill the need of a good Ford history during the Henry Ford years.

Amazing book but terrible printing- almost unreadable and grammatically inaccurate. The content of the book is fine. However, it is very obvious that no one with half a brain cell actually looked at the text before the book was made. The entire thing is written in about size 3 font, sentences end and begin seemingly randomly and none of the charts or tables are formatted correctly. A total waste of time, Whoever formatted this edition before shamelessly using Amazon print service needs to go back to primary school and understand what a sentence is and how the English language works before they try to rip you off for this

While the title reads life and work, for the author this meant more or less work is life. In a way it is an old school biography - in this case focused mostly on the company in question, rather than the author himself - in the same vein as Hilton's  Be My Guest . It is also very much focusing on the principles of management that Henry Ford believed in, and is in that way a great complement to Alfred P. Sloan's  My Years with General Motors  - something worthwhile reading for anyone interested in or working in the automotive industry (and interested in management more broadly, as well).A lot of the moves Ford made from the start at the turn of last century to the meteoric rise and peak in the early 1920's, when the book was written are described in the book, with the logic behind it laid out. You will be able to read about the $5 workday, the constant quest for production efficiency improvement, the practical (and not from forged results, like with Taylor) results of scientific management, the production line, the constant lowering of prices for the product, following efficiency gains, the mechanisation of agriculture, etc. Some, such as the introduction of the production line and the $5 a day salary are relatively well known, the rest perhaps less so and what the book does relatively well is show how the system works well holistically and what is needed in order to implement it.On top of describing production, quite some attention is being devoted to other aspects of business, which Ford considered peripheral, misused and generally badly run - such as financing, hedging, transport, law, etc. In his view the finance aspects and departments even in his day were overemphasised and one can easily see how the efficiency based system he was striving for would be hard to implement in a company where the owner / CEO does not have the ultimate control - stock markets as well as shareholders would be fairly unlikely to support the low dividend and low article profitability (compensated by a meteoric rise in sales leading to an extremely solid profitability overall) back then as well as now. His basic message being that more money will not prevent bad management, rather it will perpetuate it, removing the urgency and need for more fundamental operative changes. He also warns agains hedging (raw materials, currency etc.) - in his view, when a business makes a killing in those areas a couple of times, the temptation is great to focus the effort here rather than on production or the delivery of goods and services, something likely to lead to decline in the longer term (he did not believe it is consistently possible to beat the market).The book is also surprising if one looks at when it was written - many later authors seem to have borrowed extremely heavily from it. Ayn Rand ( Atlas Shrugged (Penguin Modern Classics) , The Fountainhead (Penguin Modern Classics) ) appears to have taken on many ideas - although her disdain for the common man is not shared by Ford (he is much more egalitarian in this respect - i.e. people have different capabilities but it is also the responsibility of the management and the people with abilities to make sure the rest fulfill their potential). The stock and flow framework of Jay Forrester's System Dynamics (as introduced by the author in his book  Industrial Dynamics ) is described here (decades earlier), too. He also seems to have predated Colin Chapman's (of Lotus fame) obsession of adding lightness to everything by about 5 decades.As for the style, Ford does not necessarily write for readability - it will be much closer to works of his time in this respect, more of a Veblen's  The Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford World's Classics)  than the work of a late 20th century management guru. Still, it is not a real chore to read, it just requires a bit more concentration.Finally, it is interesting to see how the system he devised and operated so effectively for about two decades was replaced and enriched by Sloan's version of mass customisation, something Ford was forced to adapt but a few brief years after the book was written. If you are interested in how some of Ford's ideas evolved (and degenerated) later on, I can also warmly recommend Sloan's  My Years with General Motors  for the next stage of development, Dewar's  A Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry's Self-Destruction  for the complete brakdown of relations between labour and management (also at Ford), and either DeLorean's  On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. De Lorean's Look Inside the Automotive Giant  or Yates'  The Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry  for the final stages of cancerous development / subversion of Ford's and Sloan's earlier ideas. Be My GuestMy Years with General MotorsAtlas Shrugged (Penguin Modern Classics)The Fountainhead (Penguin Modern Classics)Industrial DynamicsThe Theory of the Leisure Class (Oxford World's Classics)My Years with General MotorsA Savage Factory: An Eyewitness Account of the Auto Industry's Self-DestructionOn a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. De Lorean's Look Inside the Automotive GiantThe Decline and Fall of the American Automobile Industry

One of the best autobiographies to read. Written by humble man who achieved a lot and transformed lives of literally everyone, yet he was not afraid to admit his biggest mistakes. Ford's flat company structure, 5 days working week, continuous search for tiny improvements and detailed measurements of every process were shocking to everyone back in the early 20th century. There is so much hate towards this great man in mainstream media these days, I'd recommend that entrepreneurs shouldn't listen to that noise. By reading this short book you will get much more benefit how the automobile industry started to thrive thanks to Henry Ford.

I wanted to learn more about Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company. How did he get into manufacturing cars ? What were his methods ? How did he become so successful ? This book contains the answers and a lot more.Ford gives his opinion on just about every subject from manufacturing, industrial relations, to economics, politics and warfare. If you like to hear one of America's greatest giving his opinions then this is for you. I found it compelling reading. Henry would have approved that the book is available at a low price; read the book to find out why.

Nowhere in the book does it give the date of publication but it is clearly well before the 2nd World War! How right Henry Ford was about the influence of bankers. Once they control a business the business listed its way. And how right he was about lawyers who are certainly a self-perpetuating class only interested in their own selfish motives with no regard for justice. I fear that, in today's industrialised world, Henry Ford would have struggled to maintain his enlightened principles. Near the end of his book he makes a startling claim. To quote. "As a meter of fact, to be rich is no longer a common ambition. People do not care for money as money as they once did. Certainly they do not stand in awe of it as they once did".If he were around today he would not recognise the greedy and envious world in which we live!