Business needs more of the
professional spirit. The professional spirit seeks professional
integrity, from pride, not from compulsion. The professional spirit
detects its own violations and penalizes them. Business will some day
become clean. A machine that stops every little while is an imperfect
machine, and its imperfection is within itself. A body that falls sick
every little while is a diseased body, and its disease is within itself.
So with business. Its faults, many of them purely the faults of the
moral constitution of business, clog its progress and make it sick every
little while. Some day the ethics of business will be universally
recognized, and in that day business will be seen to be the oldest and
most useful of all the professions.
* * * * *
All that the Ford industries have done--all that I have done--is to
endeavour to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that
the sort of business which makes the world better for its presence is a
noble profession. Often it has come to me that what is regarded as the
somewhat remarkable progression of our enterprises--I will not say
"success," for that word is an epitaph, and we are just starting--is due
to some accident; and that the methods which we have used, while well
enough in their way, fit only the making of our particular products and
would not do at all in any other line of business or indeed for any
products or personalities other than our own.
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