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neglect of or skimping of work and hence of service showed itself to me in many ways. It seemed
to be at the bottom of most troubles. It was the cause of low wages for without well-directed
work high wages cannot be paid. And if the whole attention is not given to the work it cannot be
well directed. Most men want to be free to work; under the system in use they could not be free to
work. During my first experience I was not free I could not give full play to my ideas.
Everything had to be planned to make money; the last consideration was the work. And the most
curious part of it all was the insistence that it was the money and not the work that counted. It did
not seem to strike any one as illogical that money should be put ahead of work even though
everyone had to admit that the profit had to come from the work. The desire seemed to be to find
a short cut to money and to pass over the obvious short cut which is through the work.
Take competition; I found that competition was supposed to be a menace and that a good
manager circumvented his competitors by getting a monopoly through artificial means. The idea
was that there were only a certain number of people who could buy and that it was necessary to
get their trade ahead of someone else. Some will remember that later many of the automobile
manufacturers entered into an association under the Selden Patent just so that it might be legally
possible to control the price and the output of automobiles. They had the same idea that so many
trades unions have the ridiculous notion that more profit can be had doing less work than more.
The plan, I believe, is a very antiquated one. I could not see then and am still unable to see that
there is not always enough for the man who does his work; time spent in fighting competition is
wasted; it had better be spent in doing the work. There are always enough people ready and
anxious to buy, provided you supply what they want and at the proper price and this applies to
personal services as well as to goods.
During this time of reflection I was far from idle. We were going ahead with a four-cylinder
motor and the building of a pair of big racing cars. I had plenty of time, for I never left my
business. I do not believe a man can ever leave his business. He ought to think of it by day and
dream of it by night. It is nice to plan to do one's work in office hours, to take up the work in the
morning, to drop it in the evening and not have a care until the next morning. It is perfectly
possible to do that if one is so constituted as to be willing through all of his life to accept
direction, to be an employee, possibly a responsible employee, but not a director or manager of
anything. A manual labourer must have a limit on his hours, otherwise he will wear himself out.
If he intends to remain always a manual labourer, then he should forget about his work when the
whistle blows, but if he intends to go forward and do anything, the whistle is only a signal to start
thinking over the day's work in order to discover how it might be done better.
The man who has the largest capacity for work and thought is the man who is bound to succeed. I
cannot pretend to say, because I do not know, whether the man who works always, who never
leaves his business, who is absolutely intent upon getting ahead, and who therefore does get ahead
is happier than the man who keeps office hours, both for his brain and his hands. It is not
necessary for any one to decide the question. A ten-horsepower engine will not pull as much as a
twenty. The man who keeps brain office hours limits his horsepower. If he is satisfied to pull only
the load that he has, well and good, that is his affair but he must not complain if another who
has increased his horsepower pulls more than he does. Leisure and work bring different results. If
a man wants leisure and gets it then he has no cause to complain. But he cannot have both
leisure and the results of work.
Concretely, what I most realized about business in that year and I have been learning more each
year without finding it necessary to change my first conclusions is this:
(1) That finance is given a place ahead of work and therefore tends to kill the work and destroy
the fundamental of service.
(2) That thinking first of money instead of work brings on fear of failure and this fear blocks
every avenue of business it makes a man afraid of competition, of changing his methods, or of
doing anything which might change his condition.
(3) That the way is clear for any one who thinks first of service of doing the work in the best
possible way.
CHAPTER III. STARTING THE REAL BUSINESS
In the little brick shop at 81 Park Place I had ample opportunity to work out the design and some
of the methods of manufacture of a new car. Even if it were possible to organize the exact kind of
corporation that I wanted one in which doing the work well and suiting the public would be
controlling factors it became apparent that I never could produce a thoroughly good motor car
that might be sold at a low price under the existing cut-and-try manufacturing methods.
Everybody knows that it is always possible to do a thing better the second time. I do not know
why manufacturing should not at that time have generally recognized this as a basic fact unless
it might be that the manufacturers were in such a hurry to obtain something to sell that they did
not take time for adequate preparation. Making to order" instead of making in volume is, I
suppose, a habit, a tradition, that has descended from the old handicraft days. Ask a hundred
people how they want a particular article made. About eighty will not know; they will leave it to
you. Fifteen will think that they must say something, while five will really have preferences and
reasons. The ninety-five, made up of those who do not know and admit it and the fifteen who do
not know but do not admit it, constitute the real market for any product. The five who want
something special may or may not be able to pay the price for special work. If they have the
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