SOULLESS BUSINESS.

Shannon News, 29 December 1922, Page 4

SOULLESS BUSINESS.

MB HENRY FORD’S VIEWS

“A great business is really too big: to be human. It grows so large, as to supplant the personality of the man, ’ ’ says Mr Henry Ford, in his ■•.■siutobiqgraphy. ‘ 1 In a big business the '‘employer, like the is lost in the mass. Together they have created great productive organisation, . which sends out articles that the world buys for in return with money lxatprovides a livelihood lor everyone . in the business. The business'’itsQlf becomes greater and move important than the individuals. The employer is but a; man like his employees and' is subject’ to all the limitations of humanity, lie is justified in holding his job only as he can fill it.” As to the’ matter of “good feeling,” Mr Ford says; “You can hardly have too much harmony in business, but some organisations use up so much energy and time maintaining a feeling of harmony that they have no force left to work for the object for which, the organisation was created. There is altogether too much reliance on good feeling in our business organ-, isations. People have too great a fond?? ness for workijjg with 'the people they like. In the end it spoils- a many valuable qualities. Suppose do not like a man. Is that anything against you. What have your likes or dislikes to do with the facts? Every man of common-sense knows that there are men whom he dislikes who aire really more capable than he is himself. And taking all this out of the shop and into the broader fields ijt * s necessary for the rich to love the poor or the poor to love the rich. It is not necessary for the employer to love the employee, or for the employee to love the employer. What is necessary is that each, should try to do justice to the other, according to his deserts. That is real democracy, and not the question of who ought to own the bricks and the mortar and the furnaces and the mills. And democracy has nothing to do with the question, ‘Who ought to be boss.?”