Covers the history of automobile manufacturing in the US, Europe and Japan from the early 1900s to 1990. It particularly focuses on the culture and organization of Japanese companies like Toyota where long-term commitment to employees and product quality helped them attain market leadership around the world.

It includes a study of over 80 assembly plants of different companies in each region assessed.

The afterward, written in 2007 is also a great self-review and clarification in the twenty years since the book was written. However, not being so recent it did miss out on some interesting changes like the collapse of Daewoo or the massive success of Hyundai in the last ten years. ( )

Listened to just over four hours of this (~37%). I enjoyed the authors discussing the beginnings of car production through the craftsmanship in the 1880s, the move to mass production in ~1915, and eventually the evolution to lean in the last few decades. The authors really try to make the point that lean production is a 'step function', similar to how radically mass production changed things versus craft production, but they didn't fully convince me. The book itself mentions that the ROIs that Ford saw from his change in production techniques were so insane that he could afford to easily raise wages and still remain enormously profitable. We haven't seen anything similar for lean production, and although there is plenty of data provided in the book to show that lean can do much better than high-inventory mass-production, it's not the orders-of-magnitude improvements that were found in the early 1900s at Ford.

The parts of this book focusing on lowered inventories and JIT delivery reminded me of [b:The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win|17255186|The Phoenix Project A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win|Gene Kim|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361113128l/17255186._SX50_.jpg|23848838], and helped underscore to me the idea that minimizing WIP and excess inventory is generally a good thing. But the book never really had good pacing and after a few hours I felt like I was just hearing more about specifics of different factories in Europe vs. US vs. Japan, which couldn't hold my attention as someone only somewhat interested in the automotive industry. Overall, not a bad use of time and probably a good read for someone with a higher interest level. ( )

An interesting read as part of an MBA program. I found it engrossing, so read it much quicker than required by the class. ( )

The purpose of this book is to introduce the idea of “Lean Manufacturing” by showing how it was developed in the automotive industry. Thus it is a book about the history of automobile manufacturing, and how that industry revolutionized most other industries all over the world in the 20th century. The subject may seem relevant mostly to auto enthusiasts, business people, and engineers. However, the book does not demand great business or technical background to be understood. And since the automobile has had a great impact on society, and so has the manufacturing and marketing of the car, the book should be of interest to many people.

The authors divide industrial production into three types or stages. It is implied that these are usually developed sequentially: (1) craft production, (2) mass production, and (3) “Lean” production.

When Henry Ford developed his assembly line method, interchangeable parts, and other improvements in efficiency, mass production replaced craft production for auto manufacturing. The result was a dramatic increase in material gain for society, but with a well recognized diminishment in the quality and satisfaction of work for workers on the assembly line. Several decades later, Japanese auto companies developed new methods that solved some problems of mass production and which also were better suited for the smaller Japanese auto market and for Japanese labor regulations. A prime example of this new approach was the “Toyota Production Method”. The authors write that they coined the term “Lean” to describe these innovations of the Japanese automotive industry over the existing mass production methods. Some readers may recognize the term “Lean” as a corporate buzzword lacking any concrete definition. However, when illustrated by the examples in this book, the concept does gain some credibility.

The charts and tables are easily understood and useful. Clearly a great deal of good research (and data reduction) was done in order to write this book. The book has three authors and credit is also given to several more researchers for some chapters. They tend to brim with self-confidence. For example, about Henry Ford: “Ford himself had absolutely no idea how to organize a global business except by centralizing all decision-making in the one person at the top ...”. Perhaps Ford did have some other ideas, but organizing a global business in the first half of the 20th century may have been a very difficult task. But this attitude is redeemed by the Epilogue in the 2007 edition in which errors or misunderstandings of the first 1990 edition are acknowledged. ( )

it's Good book, if you want to know about industrial management and how lean production originated and developed. other wise you will find it boring. ( )