Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno is an excellent management book. Taiichi Ohno is known as the father of the Toyota Production System (TPS), also called lean manufacturing. He dictated the text to the Japan Management Association (in a series of interviews in 1982), which gives the book a sense of listening to him talk about the ideas. I found the conversational tone made it very easy to read and reminiscent of Dr. Deming’s tone in many places.
Ohno focused a great deal on the faulty perceptions derived from cost accounting thinking. He discussed the importance of not letting your understanding be clouded by thinking with the accounting mindset. “If you insist on blindly calculating individual costs and waste time insisting that this is profitable of that is not profitable, you will just increase the cost of your low volume products. For this reason there are many cases in this world where companies will discontinue car models that are actually profitable, but are money losers according to their calculations. Likewise, there are cases where companies sell a lot of model that they think is profitable but in fact are only increasing their loses.” page 32
Another area covered in the book is the whole concept of one piece flow (with quick changeovers of equipment, just in time, small lot production…). This is one of the true innovations within the Toyota Production System. I don’t think this book alone can convey how it works and why it is important but this book does a good job of giving another take on these ideas, from the person most responsible for making it work at Toyota.
The book is full of wonderful quotes including:
“There is a sequence for implementing automation that must be followed, even though it is hard. Automation just for its own sake is a problem.” page 81
“If you are observing every day you ought to be finding things you don’t like, and rewriting the standard immediately. Even if the document hanging here is from last month this is wrong.” page 125
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