My Life and Work: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

My Life and Work, credited to Henry Ford, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of My Life and Work, by Henry Ford. Read by LivelyHive. Henry Ford profiles the events that shaped his personal philosophy, and the challenges he overcame on the road to founding the Ford Motor Company. Throughout his memoir, he stresses the importance of tangible service and physical production over relative value as judged by profits and money. He measures the worth of a business or government by the service it provides to all, not the profits in dollars it accumulates. He also makes the point that only service can provide for human needs, as opposed to laws or rules which can only prohibit specific actions and do not provide for the necessaries of life. Ford applies his reasoning to the lending system, transportation industry, international trade and interactions between labor and management. For each, he proposes solutions that maximize service and provide goods at the lowest cost and highest quality. He analyzes from a purely material viewpoint, going as far as to argue that the need for a good feeling in work environments may reflect a character flaw or weakness. However, his unflinching focus on the ultimate material products and necessities of life provide clever insights in how he created an efficient and flexible system for providing reliable transportation for the average person. (Summary by LivelyHive)

Recording facts

• Recording title: My Life and Work
• Author credits: Henry Ford
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 20
• Listed recording duration: 11:34:57

Catalogue topics

• Memoir
• autobiography
• US
• Detroit
• car industry

Track guide

1. 00 Introduction - What Is The Idea? — 48:50
2. 01 The Beginning — 28:12
3. 02 What I Learned About Business — 34:28
4. 03 Starting The Real Business — 43:10
5. 04 The Secret Of Manufacturing And Serving — 33:58
6. 05 Getting Into Production — 33:07
7. 06 Machines And Men — 30:29
8. 07 The Terror Of The Machine — 33:02
9. 08 Wages — 37:24
10. 09 Why Not Always Have Good Business? — 25:03
11. 10 How Cheaply Can Things Be Made? — 40:19
12. 11 Money And Goods — 33:01
13. 12 Money - Master Or Servant? — 36:13
14. 13 Why Be Poor? — 27:45
15. 14 The Tractor And Power Farming — 28:51
16. 15 Why Charity? — 38:59
17. 16 The Railroads — 29:11
18. 17 Things In General — 46:03
19. 18 Democracy And Industry — 32:01
20. 19 What We May Expect — 35:04

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.