My Forty Years With Ford (Great Lakes Books Series)

In all, the Model T’s construction was decomposed into 7,882 separate tasks. This degree of specialization, combined with the regimented coordination of a moving assembly line, took mass production to new level of efficiency. Production time for a single vehicle fell from twelve hours to ninety-three minutes, with a new car rolling off the line eve

But the efficiency and uniformity of the Model T’s production was to be its undoing. Henry Ford genuinely believed that it was the only car people would ever need and took pride in how little it changed over the years.

The figure man in this instance was right and the salesmen were wrong. Everywhere the inventories were excessive. I then issued one of the few flat orders I ever gave to the division managers during the time I served as chief executive officer of General Motors. This order directed all division managers to curtail production schedules immediately —

Today it seems undeniable that Ford intuited how industries based on mass consumption, like the embryonic car industry, require ordinary people to enjoy leisure as much they endure work. That would explain why Ford also supported the eight-hour day and the five-day week, writing of the latter, in 1926, ‘It is high time to rid ourselves of the notio