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Manufacturing News, Source : The Manufacturer
Published : 22 Nov 2002 14:22

BOOK REVIEW: Henry Ford, and the birth of lean

Japanese car makers may have made concepts like kaizen, poka-yoke, and just-in-time famous, but Henry Ford was introducing lean manufacturing and worrying about how to keep profits from soaring too high half a century before. In Henry Ford’s Lean Vision, William A Levinson draws from Ford’s writings, the procedures in his factories, and historical anecdotes about the birth of lean in Japan to show how the philosophy that revolutionised Japanese manufacturing was the same philosophy that grew the Ford Motor Company into a global powerhouse. Levinson reveals how Ford was ahead of other modern visionaries and discusses why the very ideas that made his company such a success were abandoned in his own country, and why they finally found acceptance in Japan.

Henry Ford’s Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the First Ford Motor Plant by William A. Levinson, is available in Europe price

£31 from American Technical Publishers Ltd, 27/29 Knowl Piece, Wilbury Way, Hitchin, Herts SG4 0SX. Online bookstore www.ameritech.co.uk

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