Now, until quite recently, that is to say, some fifty to seventy years ago, the way we did things was, by present standards, quite primitive. In this connection, I should like to refer to Chapter II of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial Estate.’ It contains a fascinating report on the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company was set up on 16 June 1903, with an authorised capital of $150,000 of which $100,000 were issued but only $28,500 were paid for in cash, So the total cash which went into this enterprise was of the order of $30,000. They set up in June 1903 and the first car to reach the market appeared in October 1903, that is to say, after four months. The employment in 1903, of course, was small – 125 people, and the capital investment per workplace was somewhat below $100. That was in 1903. If we now move sixty years forward, to 1963, we find that the Ford Motor Company decided to produce a new model, the Mustang. The preparation required three and a half years. Engineering and styling costs were $9 million: the costs of tooling up for this new model were $50 million. Meanwhile the assets employed by the Company were $6.000 million which works out at almost Pounds l0,000 per person employed, about a hundred times as much as sixty years earlier.

Galbraith draws certain conclusions from all this which are worth studying. They describe what happened over these sixty years. The first is that a vastly increased span of time now separates the beginning of an enterprise from the completion of the job. The first Ford car, from the beginning of the work to its appearance on the market, took four months, while a mere change of model now takes four years. Second, a vast increase in capital committed to production. investment per unit of output in the original Ford factory was infinitesimal; material and parts were there only brie8y; no expensive specialists gave them attention; only elementary machines were used to assemble them into a car; it helped that the frame of the car could be lifted by only two men. Third, in those sixty years, a vast increase of inflexibility. Galbraith comments: ‘Had Ford and his associates (in 1903) decided at any point to shift from gasoline to steam power, the machine shop could have accommodated itself to the change in a few hours.’ If they now try to change even one screw, it takes that many months. Fourth, increasingly specialised manpower, not only on the machinery, but also on the planning, the foreseeing of the future in the uttermost detail. Fifth, a vastly different type of organisation to integrate all these numerous specialists, none of whom can do anything more than just one small task inside the complicated whole. ‘So complex, indeed. will be the job for organising specialists that there will be specialists of organisation. More even than machinery, massive and complex business organisations are being tangible manifestations of advanced technology.’ Finally, the necessity for long-range planning, which. I can assure you, is a highly sophisticated job, and also highly frustrating. Galbraith comments: ‘In the early days of Ford, the future was very near at hand. Only days elapsed between the commitment of machinery and materials to production and their appearance as a car. If the future is near at hand, it can be assumed to be very much like the present’, and the planning and forecasting is not very difficult.Excerpted from pages 632-638of ‘Small is Beautiful’ by EF Schumacher