Ah the paragon of american assembly line manufacturing, Henry Ford. As a millennial its taken me a while to get the real dirt on the guy, as in america highschools extol only his virtue.
Did you know Ford had his own secret police after he doubled the salary of his workforce?
To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married. he created a division within the Ford Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological Department
Henry Ford’s paternalism even extended the point where you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children.
Captains of industry who liked to play simcity in real life were not unusual for the time. One of the worst strikes in American history started over "company town" issues.
This is really the ongoing story of organized labor vs their corporate overlords. If you want to see real interviews and video from what living in company town with secret police is like check out the documentary Harlan County, USA.
Yes. Czech entrepreneur Tomáš Baťa (there is pretty good chance you're wearing shoes with his name right now) founded a whole city (not a town, a pretty big city for its time).
How much of those policies Ford was implienting can be attributed to the culture of the time? I understand in today's culture such a pushing of family values is pretty much illegal but i wonder how many other companies at the time had similar kinds of policies.
Adriano Olivetti, although much later in time didn’t hoist his demands on the workforce. He did lay out a huge amount of benefits that nobody in it’s right mind would complain about though... yet most of this drive died with him, as the rest of the Italian industrials preferred confrontation and stashing of their material proceedings abroad in Switzerland... perhaps it had something to do with the witchunt against anything remotely Socialist
The part of the article that starts with this paragraph is particularly enlightening:
> In implementing his vision, Ford faced cultural and climactic obstacles. People in Brazil were, for instance, used to working in the early morning, then taking a break during the hottest parts of the day, and later coming back to work. This didn’t fit with Ford’s ideal nine-to-five workday. Also, back in the States, Ford had created an industrial system where workers could actually afford to buy the products they made, but in the Amazon there wasn’t that much to buy. “There was no consumer society within the Amazon so they didn’t actually need the high wages that Ford was promising,” Grandin elaborates. So “they would work a few weeks or a few months and then they would disappear and … go back into the jungle to work their plots, to produce their own food, and maybe they come back the following year, and this would drive the Ford managers mad.” Ford’s turnover-reducing strategies didn’t work in Amazon like they had in Detroit.
This is a great example of how you can't just transplant a culture and expect it to work flawlessly. Cultures evolve to fit the environment that surrounds them, and attempting to blindly copy things that worked in one environment, and assuming they'll work in another, is folly.
Rob Dunn also tells the story of Fordlandia in Never out of Season (https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/031626072X). It’s a quick and interesting read of why we need crop diversity, and has a couple of really interesting cautionary tales.
The most enticing one to me was the story of how Cassava was saved from disaster in Africa. Somehow a certain mealybug crossed over from Cassavas native range in South America, and free from its one antagonists, it spread like wildfire and threatened the sustenance of millions. A few lone researchers tracked down the native habitat of the mealy bug in Peru, and identified a certain wasp that only prayed on that specific mealybug. They managed to introduce it Africa, thereby potentially saving millions from starvations.
Dunn’s case for crop diversity is all in all pretty compelling. I try to pitch it when I get the chance, because it deserves more attention!
The photos make it look like it's ruined today, but it's a fairly normal small central Amazonian town. There are nice beaches on the banks of the Tapajós nearby. The roads aren't great in the rainy season.
What a load of. The privatization and capitalization of literally everything is crazy. I despise companies like Nestlé for trying to capitalize common goods like drinking water. This obsession on the one-dimensional metric of money makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
There is a legitimate argument behind treating water as a market good like anything else. There is an incredible amount of waste due to water rights in California (e.g. Almond growing during droughts) because water isn't sold in an auction.
We obviously need some token amount guaranteed for drinking water. But the rest used for industrial and farming purposes should be auctioned by the government.
I see the problems you describe, but if you sell the rights in auctions you once again boil it down to the one-dimensional metric of money. I think not just how much one is willing to pay, but also what it'll be used for, is relevant.
I can recommend Jóhann Jóhannsson's Fordlandia [1] (also responsible for the soundtrack to Arrival, and sadly recently deceased) as worth a listen, inspired by the Fordlândia experiment.
I didn't know much about Henry Ford when I read that book so I was a little amused at first that he would be a central background character of a futuristic novel. About halfway through I read parts of his biography and things clicked. Great book by the way.
> Ford hadn’t bothered to learn anything about botany or agronomy before embarking on his Fordlândia experiment. He didn’t trust the kinds of experts that could’ve warned him what he was getting into. In fact, he didn’t trust experts at all — he was a figure-it-out type, skeptical of fancy educations and titles.
> Rubber trees had never been grown in the Amazon in the way that the Ford company was trying to grow them: in dense plantations, with trees planted in tight rows. This growing style might have worked in the Southeast Asian plantations run by the Europeans, but that’s because the bugs there hadn’t evolved to eat rubber. In Brazil, this density ended up creating an environment where the native bugs that fed on rubber trees thrived. Basically, Ford built a giant bug incubator, where close proximity helped pests and blight spread.
> Strangely enough, despite all of the time and money he invested in Fordlândia, [Henry Ford] never actually went to visit it himself. He had orchestrated the whole fiasco from his home, thousands of miles away, in Michigan.
This sounds like a few present-day startups, such as the one I read about here a few years ago. Someone in SF met a fellow developer, and the conversation went something like this:
"You work at a startup? Neat! What does the company do?"
"We're disrupting parking."
"Oh, that's very cool. So you've run a parking lot or worked at one, and that's given you some better ideas on how to run it?"
"No, we haven't done any of that. You have to understand, we're not interested in doing things the old way. We're disrupting parking!"
Garrett Camp never ran a taxi company. Bill Gates never ran a computer business. Etc. All them did know the problem they were solving though.
Previous knowledge of running a parking lot is not causal with startup failure. I think a better way to be critical is the fact that they say they're "disrupting" parking lots, but can't describe the problem they're solving.
>At age 17, Gates formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor.[1]
And the idea that someone needs to have run a computer business in the past in order to run a computer business in the future is illogical. It means that no one would ever be able to start running a computer business. The requirement should not be running a business in the past, but having some experience with that type of business in the past. Bill Gates had tons of computer experience.
"It means that no one would ever be able to start running a computer business. The requirement should not be running a business in the past, but having some experience with that type of business in the past. Bill Gates had tons of computer experience."
Thanks for helping me make my point.
Also, I didn't say "Bill Gates" and "Microsoft". You're right, Traf-O-Data was a "modest success". It reinforces my point.
They know the "problem" they're solving, they just can't publicly advertise it, because their actual business model is to track drivers' movements and sell the data. Want to know where Bob Smith parked on 14 May 2018? That'll be $32, thankyou.
Nothing pyrrhic about it. They're just relicensing the automotive industry's IP.
Disrupting parking with yet another expression of the gig economy. Democratization of employment. You choose when you go to steal cars, they run the chop shops.
Shorter commutes for most, improved foot traffic and they're making housing more affordable. It's like equifax, facebook or google. We all benefit.
Perhaps if you were, say, Indian, you'd feel less favorably disposed to Churchill, even if you did not live a life of opulence. You don't have to agree with someone else's perspective to be able to understand it.
Did you know Ford had his own secret police after he doubled the salary of his workforce?
To qualify for his doubled salary, the worker had to be thrifty and continent. He had to keep his home neat and his children healthy, and, if he were below the age of twenty-two, to be married. he created a division within the Ford Motor Company to keep everyone in line. It was known as the Ford Sociological Department
Henry Ford’s paternalism even extended the point where you needed the company’s permission if you wanted to buy a car, which included a requirement to be married and have children.
https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...