1922

Ford's 1922 memoir My Life and Work, co-authored with journalist Samuel Crowther, served as the operating manifesto of Ford Motor Company at the height of its Model T dominance. The book rejected the then-prevailing finance-driven view of the corporation and argued that intelligent planning and hard work, oriented around genuine customer satisfaction, was the only durable test of an industrial business. Its chapter list moves deliberately through getting into production, machines and men, the terror of the machine, wages, the tractor and power farming, money as master or servant, and democracy and industry. Project Gutenberg hosts the full text and describes the volume as Ford's account of his early fascination with machinery and mechanics and his larger critique of profit-first management. Read at a century's distance, the book remains the canonical statement of Ford's operating philosophy before his later failures of succession, labor relations, and public judgment.