My Life and Work
This is Henry Ford's own account of building the empire that changed modern life. Beginning with his childhood on a Michigan farm, where an obsessive fascination with machines set the course for everything that followed, Ford traces the improbable journey from a struggling mechanic to the man who made the automobile a fixture in every American driveway. The book reveals the philosophy behind the revolution: that business exists to serve, not merely to extract profit. Ford argues that genuine success comes from paying workers well enough to become customers, from constant improvement rather than stagnation, and from treating manufacturing as a form of applied democracy. The story of the assembly line, the five-dollar workday, and the Model T isn't just business history, it is the story of how America became mobile, productive, and modern. Ford writes with the directness of a man who built things rather than just talking about them, making this both a practical handbook for industrial thinking and a window into an era when Americans believed they could remake the world through hard work and ingenuity.
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“There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail””
— Henry Ford
“I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one...””
— Henry Ford
“Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.””
— Henry Ford
“As long as we look to legislation to cure poverty or to abolish special privilege we are going to see poverty and special privilege grow.””
— Henry Ford
“Being greedy for money is the surest way not to get it, but when one serves for the sake of service”
— Henry Ford
“That is the way with wise people”
— Henry Ford
“It is not usual to speak of an employee as a partner, and yet what else is he?””
— Henry Ford
“The natural thing to do is to work”
— Henry Ford
“Life, as I see it, is not a location, but a journey. Even the man who most feels himself "settled" is not settled”
— Henry Ford
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Ford, Henry. My Life and Work. Lex, lex-books.com/book/my-life-and-work-d549c9c4-d64d-4109-9d11-395e4ca0beeb.Ford, H. (n.d.). My Life and Work. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/my-life-and-work-d549c9c4-d64d-4109-9d11-395e4ca0beebFord, Henry. My Life and Work. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/my-life-and-work-d549c9c4-d64d-4109-9d11-395e4ca0beeb.
