The machine that changed the world

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1. isanengineerNov 2024
   There's some interesting history here. Toyota started manufacturing in North America in the 70s-80s largely due to pressure from the US government in the form of tariffs and import restrictions. For example, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Motor_North_America:

   "Toyota’s first manufacturing investment in the United States came in 1972 when the company struck a deal with Atlas Fabricators, to produce truck beds in Long Beach, in an effort to avoid the 25% "chicken tax" on imported light trucks." ... "After the successes of the 1970s, and the threats of import restrictions, Toyota started making additional investments in the North American market in the 1980s. In 1981, Japan agreed to voluntary export restraints, which limited the number of vehicles the nation would send to the United States each year, leading Toyota to establish assembly plants in North America."

   The book "The Machine That Changed the World", while a bit dated, gives a great overview of the history of Toyota from US automaker perspective.

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2. doubloonSep 2023
   I would like to apologize on behalf of other ycombo users for your top comment being downvoted, and also for people calling workers "oxen".

   I feel I seldom hear in tech circles (on the internet at least) the empirical evidence around the Toyota Production System. Maybe I didn't either until I read "The machine that changed the world" by Womack, Jones, and Roos.

   It is a historical fact that Toyota produced higher quality with lower cost all through the 1980s vs their American competitors. In the same era at General Motors, CEO Roger Smith said he would build a lights-out factory 100% run by robots. It never worked and they had to abandoned the concept.

   When I listen to those Toyota people talk about their system, the concept of mutual respect is the basic foundation. The engineers at Toyota have to spend time working on the line. Exactly what you are describing, partnership vs Taylorization.

   Sometimes I feel like this explains Tesla quality issues. When I look at how some people at Tesla think about line workers, they literally call them "Button Pushers" or even use racial slurs. Elon when he described the "machine that makes the machine" was echoing what Roger Smith said in the 80s about a "lights out factory". And here we are ten years later and Tesla does not have a lights out factory and their quality is still very low.

   Where I work in the US, it is a service business but some of the concepts still apply. Some of our tools and processes were built from the top down with little user input. It is a struggle to do Poke Yoke or Kaizen, and part of that I think may be the grapevine knowledge to "keep your head down and your mouth shut".

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3. eatonphilJul 2023
   Here are some histories of specific industries I've read recently and supremely enjoyed:

   - The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

   - The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry

   - Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World

   - Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (of all of these not the most amazing but still interesting)

   - The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War

   And then you can learn a lot by reading about the people who built the industries too. Here are a few I've been reading about recently that I recommend:

   - Edison by Edmund Morris (Just read it backwards, you'll see.)

   - Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

   - The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

   - Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

   I also got some interesting suggestions asking a similar question on Twitter a bit ago.

   https://twitter.com/eatonphil/status/1668625835350454273

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4. HamptonFoundersJul 2023
   Not sure if this is helpful, but a friend fed this conversation through ChatGPT and had it summarize for easier reading:

   -The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy -Bigger by Marc Levinson

   -The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos

   -Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World by Erik Larson

   -Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard -White

   -The Arms of Krupp: The Rise and Fall of the Industrial Dynasty that Armed Germany at War by William Manchester

   -Edison by Edmund Morris

   -Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

   -The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century by Steven Watts

   -Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler

   -The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage

   -The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick

   -Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael S. Malone

   -The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

   -The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

   -Medieval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White Jr.

   -The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

   -Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: A Study of Early Modern Physics by Eric H. Chaney

   -Early Electrical Communication by A. F. Marland

   -Bibliographical History of Electricity and Magnetism by Silvanus P. Thompson

   -Electric Science: Its History, Phenomena, and Applications by J. J. Fahie

   -The History and Present State of Electricity by Andrew Ure

   -https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

   -De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola

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5. mjulFeb 2023
   The Toyota Production System was established during Shoichiro Toyoda's leadership. It is the company's "operating system" if you will, and has made an enormous impact, both in the auto industry and in other fields such as IT.

   "Lean" manufacturing, a term from Womack & Jones, is based on their research into this.

   If you want to dive in, here is my reading list for essential books on how Toyota came to build high quality cars at scale, and how it transfers to other disciplines.

   W. Edwards Deming - the grand old man of the field, building on a strict statistical discipline. His book "Out of the Crisis" is a wonderful treatise on his thinking including his famous "14 Points for Management". This is definitely a must read that will change the way you think about management and quality. Deming provided the inspiration for the quality movement that powered post-war Japanese manufacturing.

   Taiichi Ohno - one of the greatest industrial innovators of the 20th century, the father of the Toyota Production System. After spending his career relentlessly optimizing manufacturing at Toyota he wrote the book "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production" that describes his work.

   Womack & Jones - Their books are great and it is well worth to read them all to see a lot of the principles and case studies for lean thinking. Also, it is quite interesting to see that software development is now rediscovering some of the things that manufacturing learned much earlier - in the case of Toyota as early as in the 1950s and 1960s. Begin your studies with "The Machine That Changed the World", a five-year study of the global auto industry from MIT and go on with the "Lean Thinking" and "Lean Solutions". They give a fascinating perspective on manufacturing and plenty of examples of the lean principles and they applications. These are the books that brought lean to the mainstream.

   Mary and Tom Poppendieck - with a background in manufacturing and software they were leading the effort to translate the concepts of lean to software development. They have written two great books, "Implementing Lean Software Development" and "Lean Software Development - an Agile Toolkit". Both books are well worth reading a present a both the principles and lot of cases in a friendly, colloquial manner. Highly recommended!

   Matthew May - I really like his approach to elegance and simplicity. May has worked with Toyota and their corporate university and his book "The Elegant Solution" offers insight into their innovation process - the principles it is built on and the practices that make it work.

   Jeffrey Liker - his "The Toyota Way" is a very good introduction to the application of lean methods at Toyota. This is one of the best lean books I have read. Definitely a favourite!

   This list covers up to around 10 years ago. Please comment with recommendations for more recent books on the topic.

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6. InitialLastNameAug 2022
   Instead of (or possibly in addition to) "The Toyota Way", which seems to be listicle-fied, read "The Machine that Changed the World" by James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos. It goes into deep detail and analysis of the way that the Toyota management principles infuse across the entire business.
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