Product Description
When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in
1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Today Toyota is passing GM
as the world's largest auto maker and is the most consistently successful
global enterprise of the past fifty years. This management classic was the
first book to reveal Toyota's lean production system that is the basis for
its enduring success.
Now reissued with a new Foreword and Afterword, Machine contrasts
two fundamentally different business systems -- lean versus mass, two very
different ways of thinking about how humans work together to create value.
Based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken of any industry
-- MIT's five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program --
this book describes the entire managerial system of lean production.
Nearly twenty years ago, Womack, Jones, and Roos provided a comprehensive
description of the entire lean system. They exhaustively documented its
advantages over the mass production model pioneered by General Motors and
predicted that lean production would eventually triumph. Indeed, they argued
that it would triumph not just in manufacturing but in every value-creating
activity from health care to retail to distribution.
Today The Machine That Changed the World provides enduring and
essential guidance to managers and leaders in every industry seeking to
transform traditional enterprises into exemplars of lean success.