⭐⭐⭐ The Machine That Changed the World by Womack
| Full Title | 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) |
|---|---|
| Authors | James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, Daniel Roos |
| Year Published | 2007 |
| Date Read | September 17, 2020 |
| Rating | 3/5 stars |
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 The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win, 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.