Law of Success (21st Century Edition)

INTRODUCTION TO THE MASTER MIND 85

an essay-"How and Why Henry Ford Became Wealthy." Each was
required to describe, as a part of his or her essay, what was believed
to be the nature of Ford's real assets and of what these assets consisted
in detail.
The majority of the students gathered financial statements and
inventories of the Ford assets and used these as the basis of their
estimates of Ford's wealth.
The sources of Ford's wealth included cash in banks; raw and fin-
ished materials in stock; real estate (land and buildings); and goodwill,
estimated at from 10 to 2S percent of the value of the material assets.
One student out of the entire group of several hundred answered
as follows:

Henry Ford's assets consist, in the main, of two items, i.e.,

(I) Working capital and raw and finished materials; (2) The

knowledge, gained from experience, of Henry Ford himself,

and the cooperation of a well-trained organization which

understands how to apply this knowledge to best advantage

from the Ford viewpoint. It is impossible to estimate, with

anything approximating correctness, the actual dollars and

cents value of either of these two groups of assets, but it is

my opinion that their relative values are:

The organized knowledge of the Ford

Organization

The value of cash and physical assets of every

nature, including raw and finished materials

7S percent

2S percent

Unquestionably the biggest asset that Henry Ford has is his own
brain. Next would come the brains of his immediate circle of associates,
for it has been through coordination of these that the physical assets he
controls were accumulated.