Reddit reviews Training Within Industry: The Foundation of Lean

@JustARandomGerman Dude, I'm fucking rolling with laughter. My first Master's was in military history. My second Master's was in Operations Management at Central Connecticut State University, which due to the presence of Bob Emiliani and David Stec, has an extremely heavy emphasis on Lean. They won the Shingo for their book, Better Thinking, Better Results. I've spouted Lean at basically every job I've had, and I would not have expected to meet a kindred spirit on the HoI4 Reddit, of all places. I haven't read The Machine that Changed the World, but I have read Lean Thinking by them. I like Womack and Jones a lot more than I like Liker. Lean is fundamentally a binary system: Continuous Improvement, and Respect for People. Liker doesn't even mention Respect for People. It aggravates me to no end.

But yeah, you're entirely right. Japanese industry had nothing after World War II, so any waste was a potentially crippling, if not company-closing, issue. Sitting on a huge inventory of parts, like Henry Ford was wont to do, could choke out a company running on a shoestring. What gets me is that people think that Lean is only for low-mix, high-volume applications, and it's like, you clueless shits, Shingo wouldn't have had such a fetish for SMED and changeover time reduction if that was the case! The post-war Japanese auto environment was a very high mix, so Toyota had to adapt itself to handle a high-mix environment! You can see that I am agitated by these misconceptions by my exclamation marks!


In any case. Yes, Japan came from nothing to become an industrial powerhouse. The thing is, part of that came from the Training Within Industry that I mentioned earlier, which is rooted in Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management. That is available on Project Gutenberg, and while it is extremely dated, it is very interesting to see the earliest roots of Lean management. Check it out, it's less than 100 pages, and once you strip away the casual racism of the early 1900s, you can see the bones of Lean. As for TWI, I haven't found a good source for it, though I have found this book that supposedly covers it. I haven't read it yet, though, so I don't know how good it is. But still. TWI is what lead the US to be able to make a Liberty ship in less than a week, or churn out a B-24 every hour. It only kinda shows up in HoI4, what with the tooling and concentrated factory lines, but I still don't think that it encapsulates the boost that TWI gave to the US.


Right. I'll end it here, but by all means feel free to fire back with other Lean stuff. Somewhere, I might have some articles for you, if you're interested.