Many decades ago, Henry Ford already saw bureaucracy as something absurd. He believed that creating an entire framework to solve a problem was ineffective, when the logical approach would be to eradicate its cause. He even proposed a more uncomfortable idea: that committees, boards, and agencies seemed created to distract people from the real causes of economic and social problems.
That is what emerges from one of his famous quotes, pointing directly at companies and administrations. The industrial visionary, founder of the Fordism production system, and also associated with disruptive social ideas, criticized something that more than a century later remains very present.
“Creamos tribunales y juntas para resolver asuntos que nunca deberían existir”
In November 1922, Henry Ford stated that: “Many people strive to find better ways to do things that should not be done at all. There is no progress whatsoever in simply finding a better way to do something useless“.
“There comes a moment when, instead of concealing dead branches, one must attack the root of the problem. In our industrial life, we create tribunals, boards and other bodies to resolve matters that should never exist. Instead of going to the root of the problem and eradicating the cause, we devise complex plans to permanently deal with the negative effect. This, of course, is nonsense. It almost seems that a large part of this half-hearted work is purposely invented to divert people from the real causes of problems“, he added.
In short: creating organizations or complex procedures to solve problems can end up turning their management into something permanent, rather than truly addressing what causes the problem. A strong critique of bureaucratization as a substitute for real solutions: building a complex machinery to resolve something that should never have existed.
The moment Ford wrote this, and which was published in newspapers of the time, governments were intervening more and more in the economy after World War I: regulatory agencies, committees, unions… With a hyper-practical mindset, he saw this as a brake on progress.
A problem Ford identified that remains very present today
This reflection can be applied to car manufacturing. In fact Henry Ford employed a similar logic in the pursuit of productivity: Lean Manufacturing is precisely based on eliminating unnecessary processes rather than trying to make them more efficient. And today, more than a century later, Ford’s axiom could well be part of a corporate productivity handbook.
Indeed, it has been. Deloitte cited the opening sentence of this Ford axiom in its report on AI strategy with agents for 2025. They used it to illustrate that, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, many companies and organizations are automating processes that surely should not exist. There are also endless meetings to make decisions, which end up in another meeting, approval committees that slow down work or useless middle management.
Another current example that fits with this premise is the bullshit jobs concept, proposed by the anthropologist David Graeber. The New Yorker argues that automation, instead of reducing working hours, has brought about positions that exist only to sustain unnecessary procedures or to tackle problems that could be eliminated at the root.
Graeber cites five examples, two of them perfectly applicable to Ford’s idea. The “arreglalotodos” (duct tapers), which he defines as those who solve temporarily problems that could be fixed permanently. Also the “burócratas” (box ticker), which create a false appearance of being useful. Exactly the kind of work Ford considered absurd: making the management of a problem more efficient instead of asking why it continues to exist.
Imágenes | Pexels, Wikimedia
