These days people want to improve overnight, so when they hear they have to dedicate a year before achieving results, they get scared.

Little do they know: if they practice without technique, they will get further and further away from achieving good results. By the time they reach old age, they have failed to learn anything.

If you use proper technique to practice, you can actually count the days that it takes to improve. After a year you will have reached a high level of shooting.

How is this not a shortcut?

— Gao Ying, in The Way of Archery [1637], as translated by Justin Ma & Jie Tian

The natural question is how much the values systems inculcated by these companies, whether directly or indirectly, stick around after the companies themselves become less significant. Even before the US car industry struggled with competition from imports, it had trouble keeping workers motivated. 

On the other hand, a lot more of the US workforce is on some kind of tracked career progression than was the case when Ford was starting up—we may not technically have seniority-based roles, but most of us expect to be earning more money over time in whatever we do.  So that aspect of the growth of the auto industry might be one of those permanent pieces of infrastructure laid down by a temporary industry boom, like the US’s still-excellent freight railroads (courtesy of 19th century overbuilding) and the early 2000s’ abundant fiber connectivity (available at pennies on the dollar from bankrupt 90s darling telecom plays). 

This set of middle-class values is not necessarily ideal, from either a moral standpoint or a more aesthetic one. But that makes them a bit like Henry Ford’s $5 day: soulless and boring, but still quite financially rewarding for everyone involved. 

— Byrne Hobart, writer of The Diff