Same with Drucker, Deming, and other great management thinkers of the 20th century who repeated similar mantras: respect your people, build good systems, and you have a better chance of succeeding.
We're doomed to repeat ourselves, as understanding complexity is not an easy thing to do, and it takes significant time, experience, and effort to unlearn your assumptions and learn to get closer to reality.
Ford created a morality department and forced their workers to follow his views of respectability (eg. prevent their wives from working), and to ask for permission before making large purchases, using investigators which would show up unannounced at their home to check up on their personal life.
That's some nice cherrypicking, but the morality department also prevented domestic violence and supported youth education.
Not only that, but after receiving some criticism on the issue, Ford realized his mistake and closed down the department saying that it wasn't his job to intervene in the lives of workers.
Cherry-picking is the constant reference to the higher wages, without mentioning the heavy strings that came attached. That it also had some positive effects doesn't diminish my point. Also, from what I can tell, when the department was winded down the salaries weren't higher than the market average.
You can cherry pick good qualities from past companies to emulate. That's what people are doing here. They aren't saying "Do everything exactly like Henry Ford." They are saying "Pay your workers like Henry Ford."
I was originally replying to a user that mentioned how Ford et all respected their workers, not just paid more.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that Ford did pay more, since the string attached mean the jobs are different. If some company offered me 5% over my salary but required me to be on-call, I'd say they would actually be paying me less.
