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 success. In Henry Ford's Lean Vision, William A. Levinson draws from Henry Ford's writings, the procedures in his factories, and historical anecdotes about the birth of lean in Japan to show that the philosophy that revolutionized Japanese manufacturing was the same philosophy that grew the Ford Motor Company into a global powerhouse -- and made the United States the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. 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 is a hands-on reference that provides the reader with proven principles and methods that can be applied in any business or service enterprise. It covers all aspects of building and running a successful enterprise, including Ford's principles for human relationships and the management of physical resources.

Winner of the 2003 Shingo Prize! Henry Ford is the man who doubled wages, cut the price of a car in half, and produced over 2 million units a year. Time has not diminished the progressiveness of his business philosophy, or his profound influence on worldwide industry. The modern printing of Today and Tomorrow features an introduction by James J.

"My Life and Work", by Henry Ford, reads not only as a memoir of an American icon, but also shows the spirit that built America. Written in 1922, this work provides a unique insight into the observations, ideas, and problem solving skills of this remarkable man. He shares his success and his failures and the lessons he learned form both. Throughout, Ford shows a constant belief in the value of hard work and in the goodness of men. It is a story of management, of ethics, of observation, of history and of greatness. This book includes quote highlights, photos and a special area for a reader to jot notes.

Henry Ford and George Washington Carver had a unique friendship and a shared vision. This book details their paths to "green" manufacturing and the start of the chemurgic movement in America. It covers a number of little known projects such as their efforts to use ethanol as a national fuel, the use of soybeans for plastic production, and the use of waterpower for factories. This study of their collaboration shows how capitalism can drive the green movement and expand American industry.

The success of a Lean manufacturing program depends far more on organization-wide leverage of Lean manufacturing tools than it does on the tools themselves. To this the organization must add the human relations aspects that earn buy-in and engagement by all members of the workforce, to the extent that workers will react immediately and decisively to the presence of waste. The synergy of the human and technological aspects of Lean form what Henry Ford called a universal code for the achievement of world-class results in any enterprise, and which he put into practice to deliver unprecedented bottom line results. This book expands upon and systemizes this universal code into a structure or framework that promotes organizational self-audits and continuous improvement. The book's first section offers a foundation of four simple but comprehensive Lean key performance indicators (KPIs): waste of the time of things (as in cycle time), waste of the time of people, waste of energy, and waste of materials. The Toyota Production System's seven wastes are all measurable in terms of these four KPIs, which also cover the key metrics of Eliyahu Goldratt's theory of constraints: throughput, inventory, and operating expense. The first section then adds a proactive improvement cycle that sets out to look for trouble by isolating processes for analytical purposes and measuring and then balancing inputs and outputs to force all wastes to become visible. It is in fact technically impossible for any waste of material or energy to hide from what chemical engineers call a material and energy balance. Application of this book's content should therefore satisfy most provisions of the ISO 14001 environmental management system standard and the new ISO 50001 energy management system standard. The second section consists of an unofficial (and therefore customizable) standard against which the organization

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Winner of a 2013 Shingo Research and Professional Publication AwardThis practical guide for healthcare executives, managers, and frontline workers, provides the means to transform your enterprise into a High-Quality Patient Care Business Delivery System. Designed for continuous reference, its self-contained chapters are divided into three primary s

Lean production, which has radically benefited traditional manufacturing, can greatly improve the software industry with similar methods and results. This transformation is possible because the same overarching principles that apply in other industries work equally well in software development. The software industry follows the same industrial concepts of production as those applied in manufacturing; however, the software industry perceives itself as being fundamentally different and has largely ignored what other industries have gained through the application of lean techniques.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.