The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production-- Toyota's Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That Is Now Revolutionizing World Industry

James P. Womack · Daniel T. Jones · Daniel Roos

Mar 2007 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

The classic, nationally bestselling book that first articulated the principles of lean production, with a new foreword and afterword by the authors.

When The Machine That Changed the World was first published in 1990, Toyota was half the size of General Motors. Twenty years later Toyota passed GM as the world’s largest auto maker. This management classic was the first book to reveal Toyota’s lean production system that is the basis for its enduring success.

Authors 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.

Ratings and reviews

Just finished this book up and loved how it described how the craft/mass/lean production all came to be. It doesn't so much teach any techniques, it more describes how the concepts themselves came to be and why. Good read, but might need to look elsewhere in terms of how to apply some of these techniques to other industries.

The perfect book i had seen in my career life,it means we will have one or two more method to challenge in our routine world

Phenomenal perception of the auto industry. An education in itself, this book not only provides a remarkable history of the industry but a valuable look at lean production. It explains with cutting insight it will explain many trends one can observe just by taking a drive, and provides a framework for industrial organization that will provide any reader with instant background. The book is at times overly academic in the way it presents scenarios, but despite this it is still a surprisingly easy read. Womack and Jones have fantastic insight into the manufacturing apparatus, however I would question the section on lean selling. It is based on analogies and assumptions carried over from the manufacturing comparisons they make, which will not be as applicable but are none the less worth considering as counterfactuals. This is an extraordinarily valuable read, and a must for anyone with an above average interest in business or the auto industry.

About the author

James 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.