The Machine That Changed the World ^{2nd Ed.}

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.

• Foreword 2007. Why Toyota Won: A Tale of Two Business Systems
• Before You Begin This Book
1. The Industry of Industries in Transition
• The Origins of Lean Production:
  2. The Rise of Lean Production
  3. The Rise and Fall of Mass Production
• The Elements of Lean Production:
  4. Running the Factory
  5. Designing the Car
  6. Coordinating the Supply Chain
  7. Dealing with Customers
  8. Managing the Lean Enterprise
• Diffusing Lean Production:
  9. Confusion about Diffusion
  10. Completing the Transition
  • Epilogue
  • Afterword 2007. What We Have Learned About Lean Production Since 1990
  1. International Motor Vehicle Program Sponsoring Organizations
  2. International Motor Vehicle Program Research Affiliate Team
  3. IMVP Program and Forum Participants

The book that is supposed to have started the Lean-revolution. As a book that describes the auto-industry, it is fair (even though the authors acknowledge that they were overly naive and sometimes plain wrong), but as a book that should herald a new way of thinking within manufacturing, it leaves me untouched.

Nevertheless, I would recommend it as a overview of a very important industry that affects us all, in todays society. Just don't expect any revelations.