Praise from Industry Week, January 2003
"...In Henry Ford''s Lean Vision...Levinson shows how the father of American mass production toiled to eliminate waste, instituted just-in-time delivery of inventory, and applied many other tools now identified with lean..."
Japanese manufacturers have made concepts like kaizen (continuous improvement), poka-yoke (error-proofing), and just-in-time famous. When the Japanese began to adopt these techniques from the Ford Motor Company during the early twentieth century, they knew exactly what they were getting: proven methods for mass-producing any product or delivering any service cheaply but well.
Henry Ford''s methods, however, went well beyond the synergistic and mutually supporting techniques that constitute what we now call lean manufacturing. They included the "soft sciences," the organizational psychology that makes every employee a partner in the drive for s
