Book DescriptionRelease date: March 13, 2007
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.
Editorial ReviewsFrom Library Journal This provocative and highly readable book summarizes five years of research by the International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) at MIT into the role of the autmobile industry in the world economy. The authors, all directors of the IMVP, recommend that Western automobile makers adopt the concept of lean production in all phases of automobile production. A thorough and persuasive explanation of the benefits of lean production, along with numerous examples, mainly from Japanese industry, support their recommendations. This important book offers informed insight into the auto industry; for all public and academic libraries. - Joseph Barth, U.S. Military Acad. Lib., West Point, N.Y.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review "The fundamentals of this system are applicable to every industry across the globe . . . [and] will have a profound impact on human society--it will truly change the world."-- "New York Times Magazine""A revealing and compellingly readable account of Japan's achievemnt in revolutionizing manufacturing . . . An eye-opener even for those who already knew Japan didn't do it all with robots."-- "Financial Times"The best current book on the changes reshaping manufacturing and the most readable."-- "Business Week
About the AuthorJames P. Womack is the president and founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute (www.lean.org), a nonprofit education and research organization based in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Daniel T. Jones is the chairman and founder of the Lean Enterprise Academy (www.leanuk.org), a nonprofit education and research organization based in the UK.