🏭Toyota Production System

Make only what the next step has actually taken, when it has taken it. That is 🧩 Pull systems in one line, and everything else in the book serves it: a signal card that travels back up the line, machines and people that stop when something is wrong so that the fault cannot be passed on, and a habit of asking why until the real cause appears. Efficiency measured one machine at a time is an illusion. Only the flow of the whole counts.

• Read in bed from Monday 13 October, signed off with the Hamburg cold, a hot water bottle and Pallet on my feet. Finished on Saturday the 18th.
• Short, stubborn and repetitive in the way of a man who has explained the same thing on a factory floor for thirty years. Extremely quotable. Not quoted here.
• He says overproduction is the worst of the wastes. I read that on a day when I had produced nothing at all and felt briefly virtuous.
• First published in Japan in 1978; the English edition is from 1988. Some of the oil-crisis economics has dated. The method has not.
• I had written an issue about pull in August from secondhand accounts. Reading the source afterwards was humbling in the ordinary way. The issue it did feed, 📝 Issue 49 - Local heroes, global slowdowns, was drafted from the same bed.
• More on the man: 🏛️ Taiichi Ohno.
• Book fourteen for 🎯 Finish 16 books and keep notes on the ones that matter.
• The line that stands in for him here is Franklin's 💬 Well done is better than well said: Ohno distrusted any improvement that had not been seen working on the floor. The other half of the quality story on my shelf is 🏛️ W. Edwards Deming.