James P. Womack

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.… (más)

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.… (más)