Mellencamp, Jena and Chevrolet

The nooses were a hate crime and should have been punished with the same vigor as the assult. The nooses were put up by kids raised in a heavily racist atmosphere.

The hate crime was completly ignored and the assult was prosecuted with beyond maximum force. This is what people got mad about. The whole incident is the result of institutional racism this town has always been known for.

Bullshit.

That's interesting. It also conflicts with the ethos of another anecdote about Henry. When he ordered parts from outside suppliers he went so far as to specify the exact design of the wooden box the parts were to be shipped in right down to the size and thickness of each of the separate pieces of wood. Know why? , . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They were sized to match the dimensions of the pieces of wood needed for teh floorboards of the cars he was making. I.E., they weren't thrown out, they were used as floorboards. Now you know why the floorboard is called a FlooBOARD too.

No it doesn't. You've missed the main point.

The ethos was to analyze cost benefit of reuse. There's little value to a piece of string, but good value in a piece of wood, especially when provided in a dimension that can be reused without modification. By specifying box part dimensions he was achieving free production and free shipping of parts for his cars while eliminating waste disposal that would otherwise cost him even more.

All those pieces of string could be saved and turned into stuffing for upholstery. In any case, it's a silly way to judge people, it's like not hiring someone because they salt their food before tasting it.

Which cost more in handling time and storage than the material could be purchased new.

Salt or not has nothing to do with being an office boy in Henry Ford's day. A young person's work ethos did. I wouldn't hire you because your logic is flawed.

And the string had nothing to do with the kid's work ethos. The difference in alleged effort between cutting the string and throwing it away and keeping it is so trivial as to be an absurd measure of anything relating to who would do the best job. If Ford really cared about making a meaningful snap judgment he should base is rejections on how fast they walked across the room or some other silly, but less silly then the string thing, observation.

Ford's methods, as a class of ideology, worked very well for him in his time. Are you able to demonstrate a similar level of achievement?

You're criticizing success. I've never understood how anyone can make sense of that. IMO the ancients missed this particular human foible when the formalized logical fallacies.

Getting back on off topic..

Regardless, Henry would have felt right at home in Jena

He was no saint, that's for sure. OTOH his own abused workers bought a lot of the cars they manufactured for Henry.

You are mixing up two completely different things. You haven't got the slightest idea whether he was actually hiring the best office boy by his "string" theory of evaluation. All you know is that he hired some and didn't hire some. For all you or Ford knows the ones he turned away might have done a better job then the ones he hired. What's likely is that it didn't make the slightest difference in the "success" of the office boys whether they saved the string or not All it did was make a grumpy opinionated man feel like he was accomplishing something. It's no different then interviewing candidates to take orders at a drive thru McDonalds window... you can reject any who part their hair on the left and pat yourself on the back for your astute hiring judgments. The judgment is meaningless since it has no connection to the job and in the end you wind up with pretty much the same "success" with drive thru window employees as you would have even if you didn't reject that group. And like Ford, you will think you are some hiring wizard.

Oops, your rage is now coming through! Is there froth as well? Ohhhh, I do hope there's some froth showing as well. :-) :-) :-)

It hardly matters if the office boys that Henry turned away might have done a better job because how much more successful could he have been than he actually was? His hiring paradigm obviously worked very well for him. But still you continue to protest!

Try this one on for size.

Perhaps Henry Ford was a person who would have cut the string off a box and thrown it away if he had to do this function for himself. So he hired people who he thought might think and act the same way he did because perhaps he felt they would understand his orders, and unspoken methodology, better than office boys who behaved opposite his inclinations.

I think Henry was not only successful, but was very astute as well. In large, repetitive operations the two seem to go hand in hand.

So speaking of hands....

I knew an architect-builder who hired based on watching a potential contractor performing some simple task. I asked him what he was watching for, and he provided a very clever answer. He looked at only 1 thing, "how do the tools fit the man's hands."

Unfortunately in this era just because the hand to keyboard interface works well doesn't mean the product isn't crap. I wonder what you can do to improve the situation.

LOL. I'm hardly frothing. I'm just amused by your inability to think logically.

Please tell us how he or you "know it worked"? What does that mean? If it just means he eventually hired someone then sure, it "worked". If it means his method actually resulted in BETTER office boys then if he never rejected the stringers please show how you or Henry would be able to determine that.

You can certainly THEORIZE that... or a million other theories. But where's the PROOF??? Absent some indication that this "string" test actually resulted in "better" office boys it's just a reflection of someone's unfounded bias. No different then if he rejected any applicant who had blond hair (would always be wasting time looking in the mirror) or blue eyes (too sensitive to glare, would take their eyes too long to readjust when coming inside and would waste time) or if they were left handed (they'd never be able to staple stuff fast enough doing it left handed) or had too big of feet (their clumsiness would result in broken office stuff, that's an expense Henry didn't need).

Lots of successful people have big blind spots in some areas or simply are a bit "off" in some way. Apparently Henry was "off" in his hiring theories.

Sounds pretty stupid. So I'm not surprised you are impressed by it. What makes you think it's clever?? Since most tools don't come in different sizes that theory of hiring would mean no one with big hands could ever be good at contracting because very few tools would fit their hands. Someone who is clever would simply ask them to do a typical task and see how well they could do it regardless of how the tools "fit their hands".

I guess I'd have to pay your tuition so you could go take some classes on logical and rational thought.

I can hardly wait for your next display of illogic......

Naw, you were frothing.

"Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. Ford did not believe in accountants; he amassed one of the world's largest fortunes without ever having his company audited."

Oh well.....

"Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. Ford did not believe in accountants; he amassed one of the world's largest fortunes without ever having his company audited."

Oh well.....

"Ford had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. Ford did not believe in accountants; he amassed one of the world's largest fortunes without ever having his company audited."

Oh well.....

You apparently understand tools and their use about as well as you understood Henry Ford's success.

Nice projection there fella!

And again.

Interesting. You actually believe the key to Ford's success was his office boys.

No, as I mentioned earlier, on 10/19 it was:

"The ethos was to analyze cost benefit of reuse. There's little value to a piece of string, but good value in a piece of wood, especially when provided in a dimension that can be reused without modification. By specifying box part dimensions he was achieving free production and free shipping of parts for his cars while eliminating waste disposal that would otherwise cost him even more."

Did you think I'd have a memory lapse about what I said?

You're increasingly becoming a disingenuous asshole as this discussion progresses. It is long past time for you to have thrown in the towel on this one bub.

You can hate Henry all you want, but only k00ks fail to recognize the reasons for his success.

You seem pretty good at drawing conclusions from a total lack of facts. As with the office boy issue, where there is zero factual info that his method resulted in "better" office boys, you now seem to think, again based on zero facts, that I hate Henry. I neither hate nor love him. He was an imperfect person, as most of us are. From what you have presented about how he hired office boys he was clearly an idiot in that regard. He did a good job in building ford overall. He was late to the party when it came to some of the more modern stuff and was eventually forced by the market to adapt Ford to what the other more up to date automakers were doing to stop the lose of market share. As with many "great" people, there was an element of "right place, right time" combined with his unique talents. But hiring office boys wasn't one of them. But you keep thinking it was the key to his success if it makes you sleep easy at night.