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A review by mburnamfink
Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production by James P. Womack
3.0
The Machine That Changed the World is a landmark study of Japanese automobile manufacturing that has not aged well, and if it is what passes for groundbreaking research in management, is even more evidence that the MBA is a massive scam.
The automobile the most complex consumer good around, requiring complex and highly capitalized entities to build. In the early 1980s, Japanese automakers began comprehensively beating the US based Big Three. A group of scholars centered around the MIT Sloan business school conducted a comprehensive global review of auto manufacturing, which revealed a phenomena they called Lean Manufacturing, an extension of Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System.
TPS reports from Office Space.
Look what MBAs demand our respect for. They have played us for absolute fools.
Mass production is defined by efficiency through scale. By making millions of the same thing, you drive costs per unit. Human skill is removed as much as possible to keep labor costs low. The downside of mass production is an alienated labor force that doesn't care about their jobs or the final product, adversarial relationships with customers and suppliers, immense overhead in inventory, quality assurance and rework, immense capital tied up in inventory of parts and final product, and an overall system that turns like an oil tanker, taking decades to bring a product to market.
By comparison, lean production focuses on reducing waste, variability, and overhead. Frontline workers are empowered to find solutions and encouraged to stop the line rather than let a mistake persist. The whole apparatus is configured for flexibility, with die changes (switching out the expensive metal press forms) taking minutes rather than days and inventory of parts kept to an absolute minimum. A pace which maximizes long term output is found by mixing runs of more-and-less complex cars, rather than stocking massive inventories of unwanted models. Part suppliers are brought into the design and production process to find continual improvements, rather than kept in the dark via least-cost bids and components to spec diagrams. And finally, product development teams are considered a priority, with a single leader organizing the design of a new car from start to finish, with true authority over his technical specialists, rather the GM model of a weak project coordinator trying to form consensus among an ever shifting group of people who regard their true home as whatever department they were drawn from.
It all makes sense. Get good people and trust them to do their jobs. Eliminate errors, friction, and waste. Invest in producers and not overhead. Stay close to your customers and innovate frequently. And if you need a multiyear global study to figure this out, I am legitimately concerned about your brain function. Is management some kind of debilitating brain fungus?
While lean manufacturing is all well and good, there are some obvious vulnerabilities. It requires a trusted and capable workforce, not one metrified into paralysis. There has to be a distinction between discipline worthy human errors and patchable system errors. And lean benefits from short, local, and distributed supply chains. It is supremely vulnerable to single sources of origin and long supply chains, as we all found during the Pandemic. Modern logistics systems are so potent that letting an item bounce halfway around the world for months is cheaper than just doing it locally. And as someone who's been the only developer on a project with a manager, two project managers, a systems architect, a QA tester, and partial involvement of numerous other people, corporations are addicted to useless overhead.
In a further bit of hilarity, this book was written at the peak of Japanese prosperity, and while it isn't quite Yellow Peril, it is very optimistic when in reality Japan almost immediately entered a Lost Decade that has stretched into a Lost 30 Years. Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno is a primary protagonist, yet the authors fumbled elementary elements of his biography, though he was alive and presumably available for interviews when the book was written.
The automobile the most complex consumer good around, requiring complex and highly capitalized entities to build. In the early 1980s, Japanese automakers began comprehensively beating the US based Big Three. A group of scholars centered around the MIT Sloan business school conducted a comprehensive global review of auto manufacturing, which revealed a phenomena they called Lean Manufacturing, an extension of Taiichi Ohno's Toyota Production System.
TPS reports from Office Space.
Look what MBAs demand our respect for. They have played us for absolute fools.
Mass production is defined by efficiency through scale. By making millions of the same thing, you drive costs per unit. Human skill is removed as much as possible to keep labor costs low. The downside of mass production is an alienated labor force that doesn't care about their jobs or the final product, adversarial relationships with customers and suppliers, immense overhead in inventory, quality assurance and rework, immense capital tied up in inventory of parts and final product, and an overall system that turns like an oil tanker, taking decades to bring a product to market.
By comparison, lean production focuses on reducing waste, variability, and overhead. Frontline workers are empowered to find solutions and encouraged to stop the line rather than let a mistake persist. The whole apparatus is configured for flexibility, with die changes (switching out the expensive metal press forms) taking minutes rather than days and inventory of parts kept to an absolute minimum. A pace which maximizes long term output is found by mixing runs of more-and-less complex cars, rather than stocking massive inventories of unwanted models. Part suppliers are brought into the design and production process to find continual improvements, rather than kept in the dark via least-cost bids and components to spec diagrams. And finally, product development teams are considered a priority, with a single leader organizing the design of a new car from start to finish, with true authority over his technical specialists, rather the GM model of a weak project coordinator trying to form consensus among an ever shifting group of people who regard their true home as whatever department they were drawn from.
It all makes sense. Get good people and trust them to do their jobs. Eliminate errors, friction, and waste. Invest in producers and not overhead. Stay close to your customers and innovate frequently. And if you need a multiyear global study to figure this out, I am legitimately concerned about your brain function. Is management some kind of debilitating brain fungus?
While lean manufacturing is all well and good, there are some obvious vulnerabilities. It requires a trusted and capable workforce, not one metrified into paralysis. There has to be a distinction between discipline worthy human errors and patchable system errors. And lean benefits from short, local, and distributed supply chains. It is supremely vulnerable to single sources of origin and long supply chains, as we all found during the Pandemic. Modern logistics systems are so potent that letting an item bounce halfway around the world for months is cheaper than just doing it locally. And as someone who's been the only developer on a project with a manager, two project managers, a systems architect, a QA tester, and partial involvement of numerous other people, corporations are addicted to useless overhead.
In a further bit of hilarity, this book was written at the peak of Japanese prosperity, and while it isn't quite Yellow Peril, it is very optimistic when in reality Japan almost immediately entered a Lost Decade that has stretched into a Lost 30 Years. Toyota engineer Taiichi Ohno is a primary protagonist, yet the authors fumbled elementary elements of his biography, though he was alive and presumably available for interviews when the book was written.