May I direct all those who wish to espouse to ‘Fordism’ as the solution to all Ireland’s woes to read Fordlandia.

It is the story of Henry Ford’s failed attempt to build a city in the Amazon to tap latex. There’s two sides to every story….

The nation could never afford and no longer has the credit facilities to support the dogmatic resistance to any discussion of productivity in the public sector.

It is economic gangsterism, with the young and the vulnerable paying the ransom of the protected.

Long past time for everyone to stop looking out for themselves and start thinking about what they can do for the county

The Public Service is not the same thing as the Civil Service. Public servants do NOT enjoy ‘privilege days’. A small number of civil servants do, but many don’t even know about the entitlement.

We should also remember that the public service, leaving aside any fat that needed to be trimmed ten years ago, whatever about now, has not otherwise been diminished because of one core fact: its market has not been diminished as that of the private sector has. Why then the prohibition on hiring and promotion in education? Why the sudden need to penalise with multiple pay cuts those front line public servants who are working as hard if not harder than ever, despite having received no bonuses in the bubble years? Why the random taxation of a pension provision that has been their only compensation for this unglamorous career choice? Ford would surely not have approved, making this article all the more pertinent.

What a pity Ford’s approach was besmirched by its espousal by Hitler. A bit like Wagner, really, marvellous in itself, but open to damaging misinterpretation. That said, in principle, a lot of good points in this article.

I certainly wouldn’t consider myself a huge fan of Ford’s politics, bur completely agree that public sector SHOULD be run like a private company. No way is it that complex to prevent that from happening, there’s just too many people in there hanging onto privileges and an attitude of “we always done it this way”.

Which private company should we model the civil service on? Anglo-Irish Bank? Esat? The author also confuses public servants and civil servants. Maybe next week he’ll do an article on sorting the Middle East based on Ford’s writings about the Jews.

I’d love to see him crunch the numbers on paying ‘front line’ staff €100k a year. As for “but the unions never had a dispute because the staff were paid well above average”, Simon’s suggestion boils down to a solution that largely involves throwing money at the problem.

Try running public services by standardising everyone in it to an 8 hour day. Where are your 24 hour emergency services gone? Where are your out of hours services gone?

The urgency around public sector reform demands that services are maintained in a time of diminishing resources. Henry Ford did not face that problem. He was developing a commercial product for a growing market and beating off the competition by lowering the cost of production. The production line churned out the same end product, which cannot be said of public services either.

Henry Ford’s commercial model was no longer sustainable when the US automobile industry faced competition from growing overseas markets with a lower cost base post WWII.

But you can’t offshore your public services. You can’t apply a one-size-fits-all solution to a service that has varied demands and different outcomes. Like the banking crisis, a lot of people like to think there is a magic bullet solution.

There isn’t.

You are not building cars.

I’d buy that man a pint.

It really ticks me off that I have to disagree with the author.
Time and again reductionism has led us to dehumanise the processes that are meant to support us. Eugenics anyone?
The core problem is what needs to be examined and addressed. Reading the words of a genius in one area does not mean that we can make great bounding leaps into other unrelated ones.
For me the problem at it’s base level is the human emotions of greed and fear. Base emotions that we apply to looking after our own interest to the exclusion of all others.
If we can tackle these emotions with those in power then we can have a better public/civil service.
To the author, please expand your reading material. Take on the practice of reading contradictory material to encourage thinking. Don’t go taking that leap of faith without questioning first the form and fit if it.

I am a primary school teacher. Does Ger Finan (and do others in this debate) think a child is the same of a can of beans? You cannot fill a child with knowledge in the same way as you fill a can with beans.
Henry Ford was on record as saying that people could have any colour car they wanted, as long as it was black. Following the “schools should be like Henry Ford’s Factory” analogy, children undergoing this “process” can have any education they want, as long as it is exactly the same education as everyone else is getting, whether this suits their individual abilities, strengths and weaknesses or not, whether they need extra help in order to keep up or not. There are many weaknesses in the education system at the moment but one of it’s great strengths is the quality of teachers in that system and the commitment of those teachers to education and to the education, well being and empowerment of the children in our care.

Excellent article. Would love to read Ford’s ‘Today and Tommorow’ book mentioned in the article.

Interesting to see that an intelligent man should , having read a good book , feel the need to regurgitate it undigested and commend the product to the nation. There is no mention of altruism , no word of the more subtle paths to motivation and a depressing acceptance of materialism as the be all and end all. Thank Mammon it’s not Monday!

It’s been one of those days.

http://xkcd.com/386/

This is a quite wonderful thread , congratulations to all involved . Henry Ford has to be looked at in the context of the early 20th century when the new technology was astonishing and exciting . The first reaction of some clever and focused individuals was to find great potential benefit in mechanising human behaviour . Now however , we should be working at how we might become fully human in all the many ways possible to our nature . Who knows, besides being better people ; we might just produce a better class of widget .

Some excellent points and i fully agree. Its an awful shame you didn’t run in the general election, Simon. I would have definitely voted for you.

No mention of how unions have brought the country to it’s knees in terms of wage negotiations? That’s what has destroyed the public sector, imo.

It’s false rhetoric. The two are mutually exclusive. You cannot (and should not) run a country like a company. One is for profit; the other is for the people. This Op Ed shows a lack of understanding of how Government actually works.

Then again, it is just an opinion piece. Not strictly journalism, per se. Eh? ;)

Please excuse typo in last post. Meant “country” as final word

Simon:

“Some staff were members of trade unions but the unions never had a dispute because the staff were paid well above average.”

You’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. Henry Ford was famous for being anti-union, often violently so. From Wikipedia:

“Ford was adamantly against labor unions. … To forestall union activity, Ford promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to head the Service Department. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. The most famous incident, in 1937, was a bloody brawl between company security men and organizers that became known as The Battle of the Overpass.”

Absolutely fantastic. It’s definitely the way the country should be run and the kind of thinking we need to get back on the right road – and stay on the right road.

A good article, with plenty of praise for FOrd. Nothing wrong with that, he was very successful after all. A couple of points:
1. Ford’s method of ensuring that his car was the “people’s car” was promoted by his system of payment by instalments for the Ford. Forward thinking and radical at the time, it ensured loyalty and good promotion.
2. While I cannot fault the proposals for thepublic service, i.e. nurses, teachers and so on, it needs to be mentioned yet again that the Civil Service, whose privilege days started this debate, are not the same as the Public Service.

Cheers for the article Thought it was quite interesting and agree much of what you say. One of the major reasons we are broke is because people make decisions based on their fears, hopes and various other emotions rather than on sound rational judgments. I wonder how our civil and public services would be run if all the emotions were taken out of the decision making and the country were run more like a company. Perhaps it would be fairer and more equal to everyone. Oh wait the fat cats in shiny suits wouldn’t like that cause they wouldn’t get their bonuses, big fat pensions, golden handshakes, privilege days, etc. In addition, I do not understand how government works any more than the majority of civilians – in fact they continue to astound me daily with their decisions and I question why the running of the government should not be profitable, both monetarily and socially.

‘A country is not a company. But it should be run like one.’

That was a rather astonishing statement. The framing of businesses as rational efficiency machines is at best incomplete. The reason businesses are so concerned with efficiency is because their purpose is to find the best way to extract as much work from their employees and as much money from their buyers as they can without either resource folding up. Maybe that sounds like an attractive plan for governance to the author, but not to me.

That it is now necessary to point out that governments do not exist to turn profits is deeply worrying. What we lose when we value ‘process’ over result is the sense that the state is concerned with protecting the common welfare. This is not simply an ‘emotional appeal’ – a government that lists you as either an asset or a liability cannot help but treat you dreadfully.

Hi Simon
Thanks for the response

Few quick questions. If you have never worked in the “public service” and indeed, by your own admission, have no idea how it is run what is the basis of your opinion, or indeed the opinions of others who inform your opinions

A deeper meta question that most technocrats (i use that in the literal rather than pregorative sense) seem to avoid all the time is the question of what are public services for exactly? how do they relate to democacy as well as economics. In some senses you make that clear without actually needing to say it. However i run workshops on this stuff, getting people to disentagle pretty uncritical self thought to reach underlying assumptions. eg Why would you describe children within an educational setting as customers. What are the assumptions about the nature and dimensions of public service by reducing them to a pretty simplictic notion of passive consumer etc.
You are clearly have an inquisitive mind, and thanks for the contributions

The irony of misspelling learn is not lost on me.

Ford did not nearly bankrupt his company because he mistook the mood of the customer.

He failed because he fired anyone in Ford who made a decision. Peter Drucker devotes and entire chapter in Principles of Managment to Ford and how he nearly destroyed his own company through a mix of incompetence and dark problems. I am all for running the country on an efficient basis, but citing the works of a raving anti semite whose incompetence nearly derailed the allied war movement is clutching at straws that are sure to break this camels back!

When posting my comment to your original post this morning I did so not realising you were scraping overtime and teachers extra long holidays. for that I apologize and actually agree substantially with what you say, although I still think the guards get paid more than enough in this country.

Interesting article but have to say i completely disagree with the sentiment.

The drive for Managerialism is one of the central cultural problems within capitalism today. The drive for efficiency actually is a drive for beurocracy.

“Processing a passport application is a process. Teaching a child is a process. Open heart surgery is a process. You find the best way today, do it, improve it and get paid a fixed wage for doing so.”

Ok. I was just sick a little there. The idea that the dimensions of education of children is in anyway similar to ‘processing’ a passport suggests you dont get it at all. There is no sociological dimensions there at all. Thats somehow children can be ‘educated’ via a streamlined process where efficiency is key with little or no understanding of what ‘education’ should be about.

This is neoliberalism par excellence, and as an idea has zero intellectual integrity as an acorss the board appraoch to either public service,or indeed how society should/is socially imagined once one start taking apart the underlying syptoms. Managerialism, much like its bedfellow ‘meritocracy’ is part of a set of ideas that have their own internal logic as conservative economics does when externalities are ignored

By the way, the country has and is being run like a company. We are all the workers, and like most companies the profits are already squirrelled of ny the few. 1% of the population own 34% wealth. Reading this probably makes the reader think i must be a communist. Maybe i am, but it sure as hell puts a bit of light on the way this company is run right now, and its clear the problem is not with just existing porcesses, but the underlying ideology that lets successive owners keeps shafting us

If Journal.ie wouldlike a more extensive response gimme a shout

I’ve read some shite in my time and this is right up there. You haven’t a clue about the public sector and how it works.

Not all businesses are run ‘for profit’

I have worked in the public service (an post) and the civil service (social welfare) and from my direct experience there and having worked for large multinationals and as a business owner the one clear difference is accountability. There is none in the civil and public service (pause now while the non proactive sector employees on this thread click on the dislike button)

Henry Ford was right to bash the unions. They have been a cancer t the heart of our society. They stifle progress and engender an attitude of entitlement. Was never cursed with them at any of the large or small organisations I worrked for in the productive sector.

Just a few thoughts on running a country like a business.
1) How do you make social welfare profitable and if you cant do you rationalise and get rid of it altogether?
2) Electricity in rural areas, if its losing money do you just drop the idea?
3) How to make public libraries profitable – charge rental fees?

The point I’m making is that it is the nature of government that certain areas make a loss. Ford would not see it that way and his system perhaps could be applied to US hospitals, government etc but is that the kind of society you want?

“It was an attempt to show that governments are not actually that different from businesses when you remove the emotional, sociological and societal elements from the argument. They are filled with processes and people waiting to be improved.”

Why would a society collectively decide to remove “emotional, sociological and societal elements from the argument”
How is that any improvement. Thats actually a standard argument that has its basis in the Crowellian movements and the counter revolutionary forces during the French Revolution. eeek

@Ricky “Empty emotionalist rhetoric.
The principle behind processing a passport application and teaching math to kids is essentially the same, no matter how much you wish it wasn’t. This is why teachers are given a set curriculum to follow, rather than given free reign to undertake some wholesome, fuzzy holistic approach.”

You dont know alot about pedagogy Ricky do you. Nor how to make a substantial argument
The main reason teacher are given a set cirrucumlum, very define etc has much more to do with the historical and sociologocial development of educational institutions and practice. Your setting up a strawman, and rather aggressive argument instead of geting to what i was saying.

So how is teaching maths to kids(1 teacher 30 kids) and processing a passport application the same? Please expand there as actually an inability to dothat suggest that you agree with the central premise of the article without actually understanding its substance. Ive give you a head start in framing it
whats the same
whats the difference
How are they differece
what are the subset processes, intereaction etc

Looking forward to it Ricky

Thankfully a sane voice again Máire. We really do live in a time when the lunatics are running the asylum. The article is complete bunkum to two fronts.
1 There is no such thing as an educational process that can be defined as efficient.
2 Henry Ford was not pro union at all

Would like to see the author come back in on this really.

If we where serious about living in a democracy as an emphasis, rather than simply an economy we would see the need to a programme of political, economic and social literacy so that all people can make collectively informed decisions about the things that affect their lives.

Hello everyone,

Firstly, thank you all for taking the time to read this and share your comments, both positive and negative.

A number of issues have been raised so I will try to answer them as best I can.

1. FORD & UNIONS
Ford hated unions, there’s no doubt about it. With reference to Mark Malone’s comments, my article never claimed Ford was pro-union. It simply stated that he paid his staff so well back in 1914 that compared to their other members, associates at Ford gave their union very little to complain about. The “Battle of the Overpass” that Cormac Pearle refers to happened in 1937, 23 years after the same events I discussed in the original article about him doubling wages. This saved Ford significant amounts of money as the men “had fewer worries at home, so their mind could be more attuned to finding better ways to do the work”. Unions, he argued, would stifle this goal of improving efficiency so as to try to increase employment by forcing companies to employ 2 men when 1 would do.
While I don’t condone the violence used when the United Auto Workers (UAW) were trying to represent his employees in 1937, Ford’s belief had remained the same i.e. that unions would do more harm to SOCIETY (not just his company) by reducing overall productivity.

2. FORD’S MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES
Ford’s principles of management were simple. In the making of a car, he broke every operation from mining iron ore to fitting a steering wheel into simple, step-by-step processes. He removed the majority of the skill needed so that anyone could do the job and that “men of little skill or intelligence” could be employed rather than being out of work living off the state. He paid everyone $6/hr when the market rate was half that (1914). His methods were recorded and improved daily.
The exact same approach was taken to running a school, however he was all too aware that children are not cars or cans of beans as Máire Ní Chróinín put it and cannot be taught the same way. But the approach was the same i.e. develop a process, deliver it, improve it and repeat.
He did the same thing with a hospital. Doctors and nurses were employed on a fixed salary, the hospital was privately run but open to everyone regardless of their wealth. Everybody paid the same and were treated on a first-come, first-served basis. Those who couldn’t afford to pay outright were assisted in setting up a longer term payment plan. Doctors were not allowed to run a separate private practice so their focus was on improving the processes within the hospital.
He purchased a railway and immediately let 1,000 staff go. He streamlined operations, increased wages and told everyone that their job was the running of the railway. Engineers worked on engineering problems primarily, but could often be seen painting a station building or cleaning a rail carriage or doing whatever else was necessary to run the railway. Prior to this, the attitude was “that’s not my job” or “that’s not in my agreement”.
Ford proved, not that managerialism was the way to go, but that if you took a simple, factual view of any process or any organisation, it was possible to improve the efficiency of it.
Obviously, money is only one factor. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs argued that people need more than this to be fully motivated. Ford today still has a moving assembly line, as does every other company making cars. Some companies still treat people as simple workers and use only their hands and feet. The best ones use their brains as well. Ford failed to do this in the early days.

3. PROCESSES
Ger Finan is correct on his interpretation of what I was trying to say about processes. Ford never claimed he could churn out qualified students as efficiently as he could churn out Model T’s. But instead of dwelling on the sociological aspects of teaching, he simply stated the facts. The raw student is the Input, a more educated student is the output. The process is the method of dispensing information and assisting the student in learning this information.
The public sector (including the civil service) is full of processes. If processing a passport takes 5 different steps, the traditional way might be to apply Step 1 of 5 to 1000 passport applications on Monday, Step 2 on Tuesday, Step 3 on Wednesday and so on. Ford would have lined up all those processes and may have had 5 people side by side repeatedly processing one application at a time through each of the 5 steps. This would mean that rather than waiting until Friday for the first complete application, you would have applications completed everyday thereby reducing the overall waiting time for the customer.
This is a very simple example and proves more importantly how common sense can solve a problem rather than the focus on spending money improving an individual step in the process.

4. FORD’S OTHER WRITINGS
I’ve never claimed Ford was perfect. He very nearly went out of business by failing to account for a change in his customer habits when Chrysler and GM became more serious competitors and offered more consumer choice. His handling of the UAW union situation was appalling. His writing of “The International Jew”, which I have read but not studied in as much details as “My Life & Work” and “Today & Tomorrow” is typical of Ford. If you can leave the obvious racial elements aside for a moment, the style of writing is the same as that of his other works i.e. factual, free from speculation, well thought out and to the point.
In relation to his dealings with Nazi Germany, again I can only put it down to the fact that Ford had an opinion on a subject. Hitler used violence, Ford used words. Both very powerful tools, both born out of hatred of the Jewish race. It is impossible to condone his support of Nazi Germany and I will make no attempt to do so.

5. OTHER THOUGHTS ON FORD, MANUFACTURING & GOVERNMENT
My first love is manufacturing. I am an absolute nerd, particularly when it comes to “Lean Manufacturing” or more importantly the complete “Lean Enterprise”. Toyota are credited with developing this system in the 1930’s, 40′s and 50′s and are still improving today. They are without doubt the most admired manufacturing company in the world. Many of their ideas came from Ford but they combined the assembly line – or more specifically idea of lining up the individual steps in a process side by side – but also offered customers choice. Lean is about 5 things. Defining value, examining the “Value Stream”, Flow (making things step by step one at a time), Pull (taking items/information from the previous process only when needed) and Perfection i.e. aiming for it.

“Lean” as a management concept is already being taught in government, particularly in the health service. Anyone working within the health service will have heard of “5s”, “Kaizen” and “Kanban”. Very often, consultants are hired to manage a “Lean Transformation” in a hospital but as usual make a complete mess of it because the management structures in place make it impossible to engage the frontline staff. It is managed top-down and like other management concepts (TQM, WCM etc), “Lean” is in danger of getting a bad name. However, the goal is a good one. Apply the principles of business to that of running a government and you can improve its efficiency.

An early comment by Tomss faa stated that I “haven’t a clue how the public sector is run”. This may be true, as I have never worked in it. However my opinion remains the same. It is an inefficient mess of a system and a severe waste of human potential in a lot of cases. Raynond Cahill’s anecdote is an example of this but his story is not the fault of the people, rather the process and the constraintes within it. If frontline staff were allowed to improve these processes themselves and asked their opinion, they would solves these very fixable problems immediately.
My mentioning of the €100,000 for front line staff was a rounded figure, but it assumed that the new principles applied would remove 4 or 5 layers of management and the staff therein i.e. significantly reducing the size of the public sector. I have no interest in OECD figures or comparisons with our European neighbours. ALL GOVERNMENTS are inefficient by their design.

Mark Andrew Salmon asked that if a part of Government was loss-making, would I shut it down? I absolutely would not. In many companies, certain products are “loss-leaders” but they are part of a range. When you take the overall range of products, they are profitable. Ford knew this too and managed a railway at a loss for years but he saw it’s overall importance and need.

As I stated in the beginning, this is an opinion piece and meant to provoke a discussion. I am clearly on one side of the argument and respect those who disagree with my point of view. This was not an anti-union rant or a declaration that one man’s management principles should be entirely applied to Government. It was an attempt to show that governments are not actually that different from businesses when you remove the emotional, sociological and societal elements from the argument. They are filled with processes and people waiting to be improved.

Hi Mark,

Firstly, my opinion on the workings of the public sector are made up of reading about it in the media, researching the history of it and talking to friends who work in it. I have also discussed this with colleagues working in the area of the “Lean Enterprise” (particularly healthcare) in Ireland, the UK and the US who have all noted common denominators with each system i.e. it’s made up of processes, it doesn’t really matter how the country is run or which party controls it.

Every process has a number of steps and every process has waste. In terms of education they are summarised here (http://leanineducation.com/getting_here.asp), healthcare here (http://www.gemba.com/consulting.cfm?id=92).

With regard to my own views on healthcare, I believe that every hospital should be private. I believe that every hospital should be available online with price lists published for the sake of competition. Hospitals will be open 24/7/365 and staff will work on rotating 8-hour shifts with no overtime. Patients will have the option to book theatre times for relatively routine procedures (similar to an NCT) at weekends or in the early hours of the morning. All staff will be contracted to work solely at the hospital and no doctor will be allowed to practice privately outside of this.
No production line, factory or hospital should be scheduled at anything above 90%. 85% is considered world class in some areas of lean manufacturing. With routine procedures scheduled this way, emergency procedures can be managed more easily when they arise. Hospitals will know the average time that emergencies take up over a period of a week or a month or a year and in general they can allow for this in a schedule. An emergency procedure in medicine is the same as a sudden surge in orders in a manufacturing company. There are simple ways of managing both.

Procedure costs will be charged on a “pay-as-you-go” basis, either up front or for more expensive procedures, specific finance packages can be sold either by the hospital or by the banks but not by insurance companies.
All hospitals will be 100% self-sufficient and financed by domestic and international investment. The infrastructure may be owned by the state but the running of it done privately with possible 5 or 7 year rolling contracts tendered for by any European (or why not global?) companies.

As for schools, again 100% private but in this case the school curriculum will be decided by the state depending on medium term economic needs (What’s our economic model? How many doctors and nurses do we need? How many plumbers will be need? How many business students?). The infrastructure should be provided by the state but the running of it done by private institutions who are responsible for marketing themselves at a price that any and all can afford (Tender could specify that each school can have a scaled price with perhaps 10% of children from poorer backgrounds admitted for free). It should not be the job of the state to educate each child but to provide the infrastructure where a parent can decide how that child should be educated. To answer Mark’s question, I would see them as potential “customers” of each school buying a service like any other. The public service is “selling” a range of services essentially.

As for social welfare? You’ll love this. It would have to be ruthless. We would need a system that was fair but that people had faith in. We would spend whatever was necessary to eliminate fraud. Long term unemployed would lose all benefits (employment, child, housing, and medical) after a maximum of 5 years. If that meant zero income, so be it. The exceptions to this would be pensioners. Of course the pension age would be raised to at least 70. But after that, you’ve paid your debt to society and a state pension should be generous enough that you never have to worry about the electricity or gas bill.
Conversely, the employment taxes raised (PAYE, PRSI or the equivalent) would allow someone who did lose their job through no fault of their own to be provided with a much higher rate of social welfare than currently exists. This would allow people to maintain a standard of living similar to what they were previously on, but allowing them to contribute to their own training and to up skill as they saw fit, rather than trying to accommodate them on a state-funded limited placement scheme.

Mark asked: “Why would a society collectively decide to remove “emotional, sociological and societal elements from the argument”?”
I would answer thus. When you remove all of these elements you can get things done. When people get sick, they want to be cured. When they go to college, they want to learn. When they need a passport, they would prefer to have it today. They wouldn’t care if you were paid €100,000 net annually either as a government employee or a private employee in a hospital or school so long as the service was provided as needed.

John, I completely agree with your statement that “we should be working at how we might become fully human in all the many ways possible to our nature”. Ford forgot to use the brains of his front line staff. We can learn from that. But we don’t need to be “world class”, we’re a small nation. We just need to be good enough. Perfection is the goal and is one of the principles of “Lean Management”, but it’s unattainable and that’s the whole point, you never stop trying. In Ireland we built the IFSC and thought we had a world class financial centre. Then people forgot to manage it. We build a “world class” road network but then run out of money to manage them or build proper service stations.

It all goes back to my initial point. Define a process (one that’s GOOD ENOUGH to get the job done today with a level of quality that’s acceptable to the customer). Improve it tomorrow. Repeat.

1 Ricky – Ok your following a pretty much dicredited notion of pedagogy (ie the banking model of education) to speak about learning ie “kids will be taught the same set of subjects at the same rate in the same way.” No if you want a state run ritual for kids to go through so that it suits your idea of an “effecient process” sure – but dont call it education. There isnt one educatonalist in the last 30-40 years agree that this is a useful model of learing for people. Pretty good for producting uncritical flexible workers under neoliberalism, but again that does not makeit education.

Parameters of ‘intelliegence’ and memory capacity show that yourve learned well from the institutional rituals youve gone through but dont really expressing the dimensions of knowing very well. As such this is a kinda circular argument. You are talking about the ritualise processing of human beings through a system of standarised tests, where humans are graded against each other in some form of individual validation process. Such processes tell you very little about the diversity and ranges of a person intelligences, but more how the conform to institutional cultures and norms. Again its cannot be called education under any literal uinderstanding of the term.

AS for Ford having the sunshining outof his ass, the original poster is again wrong. Henry Ford and his company where strong organised and militant union bashing with several notable examples of violence against workers trying to organise themselves. The suggestion that Ford factories where some sort of workers paradise are misleading, it was a long and at times violent struggle before Ford would recognise the ‘right’ for workers to organise together to imporve their resistance. The struggle itself was the bases the novel “The Flivver King A Story of Ford-America” by Upton Sinclair.

Couldn`t agree more, Simon.

@Roger – The reason he fired Henry Couzens in particular was because Couzens was one of the first people to suggest that they needed to make an alternative to the Model T, which was becoming increasingly obsolescent.
Ford said in the early days that “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have asked for a faster horse”. He became obsessed with making the Model T so accessible to everyone that he forgot about the Sales & Marketing side of the business.
I think it’s unfair to dismiss him as an anti-semitic lunatic due to a handful of incidents such as these. In manufacturing circles we take so much of the good that he brought to modern production, but are also careful to point out where his ideas could be improved. So much of what he said and did over a 35 year period was ahead of his time and it’s a shame that he can be dismissed so easily because of a couple of bad business decisions and his political and personal opinions outside of his work.

Peronally I’m looking forward to Simon’s take on Henry Ford’s other writings, notably The International Jew.http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/intern_jew.htm or what he thinks of Ford building tanks for the nazis.

Henry Ford….the notorious anti semite and biggot….yes let’s all elarn from him.