Japanese manufacturers have made concepts like kaizen (continuous improvement), poka-yoke (error-proofing), and just-in-time famous.  When Japan began to adopt these techniques from the Ford Motor Company during the early twentieth century, it knew exactly what it was 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 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.

About the Author:
William A. Levinson, principal of Levinson Productivity Systems, P.C., has authored and co-authored several books with the American Society for Quality including Lean Enterprise: A Synergistic Approach to Minimizing Waste, ISO 9000 at the Front Line, SPC Essentials and Productivity Improvement, Leading the Way to Competitive Excellence, and The Way of Strategy.

• Preface
• Why This Book Was Written
• Introduction: What to Expect from this Book
• How to use this book
• Background resources
• Lean manufacturing is an American invention
• Ford and the human element
• Ford and operational effectiveness
• Influences on Ford

1. Brave New World: Changing how the World Works
• The Bottom Line: Ford's Results Speak for Themselves
• Ford’s Breakthroughs in 1908 Won the Second World War
• Ford’s Transformation of American Society
• The End of Hunger
• Defining Lean Enterprise
• Lean Enterprise in a Single Word: Friction
• Lean Enterprise, ISO 9000, and ISO 14000
• Lean Manufacturing Is an American Invention
• Flat and Porous Organizational Structure
• Ford and the Toyota Production System
• Ford's Basic Principles
2. Ford's Principles: The Foundation
• Natural Law
• Natural Law Is Self-Evident and Self-Enforcing
• A Universal Code of Human and Organizational Behavior
• Natural Law Is the Foundation of Government
• Ford and Eastern Philosophy: The Japanese Connection [Why Japan may have been especially receptive to Ford's ideas]
• Ford's Karma or Destiny
• Henry Ford Answers a Zen Riddle
• Continuous Improvement: Kaizen
• Beware of Complacency
• Find a way or make one
• Mass Production Requires Continuous Improvement
• Price Reductions and Continuous Improvement
• Bringing Win-Win to the Workplace
• Implications for lean manufacturing
• Europe steps backward
• Natural Law and Labor Relations
• Service
• Serve and the profits will take care of themselves
• Service includes quality and reliability
• Summary
3. Ford on Labor Relations
• Management and Labor as Partners
• Mutual trust and commitment between labor and management
• Industrial justice
• Think "employment," not "employer and employee"
• Parsimony is not economy
• Communication between management and labor
• No one wins a strike
• No Free Lunch: A Key Concept
• Managers and workers must grow the business
• Human Resource Practices
• No restrictive work rules
• The role of handicapped workers
• The role of older workers
• Employee Housing and Stores
• Employee commissaries
• Employee credit unions
• Summary
4. Principles for Organizational and Personal Success
• Persistence
• Initiative
• Committees and experts stifle initiative and progress
• Breaking Down Organizational Barriers [key principle of W. Edwards Deming and Tom Peters, e.g. "porous organization"]
• Flattening the organization
• Mechanistic and organic management systems
• Corporate Culture at the Ford Motor Company
• The champion's companion
• Sorensen: "What Made the Ford Organization Tick?" [Charles E. Sorensen was Ford's production chief]
• Sorensen: "Work was Play"
• Henry Ford's personal leadership
• How the Ford Motor Company lost its culture [This section answers the question, "Why aren't we doing these things today?"]
• 2001: Ford rediscovers its own heritage
• The collapse of the original Ford organization, 1943
• Unionization at Ford
5. Perceiving Genuine Value
• A Warning to the United States
• Manufacturing: The British Had Good Thing and They Knew It
• Manufacturing: China Knows a Good Thing When It Sees It
• Manufacturing's Low Prestige
• Other So-called Industries Cannot Replace Manufacturing
• Factories Create Jobs Outside Their Walls
• Everything Must Add Value
• Middlemen Do Not Add Value
• Anyone Want a Used Shopping Mall?
• Car Dealers' Showrooms Add No Value
• A New Model for the Recording Industry
• Advertising as Waste
• The Benefits of Continuous Price Reduction
• Continuous Improvement Increases Sales per Customer
• No Free Lunch
• Putting Finance in Perspective
• Don't Let the Cost Accounting System Run the Business
• Don't Let Stockholders Pull the Strings
• Who Should Run the Company?
• Mergers and Acquisitions
6. Ford on Economics, Government, and Health Care
• Business Cycles
• The Stock Market Should Be Irrelevant to National Prosperity
• Monetary Systems Can Help or Hurt Wealth Creation
• Unemployment and inflation
• The Role of Inexpensive Energy [This section addresses the Kyoto Global Warming Treaty or Kyoto Protocol]
• The Roles of Power and the Machine
• Consequences of Rising Energy Costs
• The Role of Government
• Why Government Is Rarely Efficient or Responsible
• Ford on the Inheritance Tax
• Government as the Problem
• Taxes Cause Poverty
• Health Care
• The Henry and Clara Ford Hospital
• Error-proofing (Poka-Yoke) in Health Care
• Scientific Management versus Rationing and Cutting Corners
• Not an Argument for Socialized Medicine
7. Eliminate Waste [The keystone of lean manufacturing!]
• Everything But the Squeal
• Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut Hole
• Chipless Machining
• Transportation as Waste
• Beyond Recycling
• Waste Reduction at Ford Today
• ISO 14000 Is Free
• Example: Fumes from a Coating Operation
• Keeping an Eye on the Smokestack: Coking of Coal for Profitable Byproducts
• The Fuel Cell: An Innovative Way to "Burn" Coke or Coal [Intelligent environmentalism versus the Kyoto Treaty]
• Reducing Greenhouse Gases from Livestock—At a Profit
• Paint the Parts, Not the Air
• ISO 14000 Today
• Summary
8. Ford's Factory [The longest chapter, and it covers specific lean manufacturing and quality techniques]
• The Factory and the Worker
• Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)
• Standardization supports continuous improvement
• Standardization and best practice deployment [touted as leading-edge elements of Six Sigma, actually deployed by Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor]
• Lean Manufacturing
• 5S-CANDO
• Small lot and single-unit processing
• Single-minute exchange of die (SMED)
• Parallel processing and testing to keep work moving
• Tool efficiency
• Motion efficiency and task subdivision
• Cellular manufacturing and unitary machines
• Other techniques for cycle time reduction
• Visual controls and the visual workplace
• Just-In-Time (JIT) Manufacturing and Inventory Reduction
• Inventory and production control at Ford
• The Theory of Constraints [Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt's theory of constraints]
• The origin of JIT and the assembly line
• Suppress variation in processing and work arrival times
• Assuring machine availability
• The effectiveness of continuous flow
• Ford, Toyota, and drum-buffer-rope (DBR) production control
• The need for reliable transportation in JIT
• Inventory as a symptom
• The value of time in project management
• Design for Manufacture and Design for Assembly
• Select the right material of construction
• Design for reliability
• Design for maintainability
• Quality function deployment (QFD)
• Benchmarking
• Process Simplification and Improvement
• Process changes can improve efficiency
• Innovative ways to eliminate waste motion
• Self-check systems
• Error-proofing, or poka-yoke
• Variation and Accuracy
• Process capability and product improvement
• Process capability and product quality
• Gage calibration and gage capability
• Packaging and Delivery
• Point-of-use Assembly
• Occupational Safety
• Industrial safety principles and practices
• Protective apparel
• Lockout-tagout
• Ergonomics and repetitive motion injuries
• Safety committees
• Workplace comfort and hygiene
• Workplace lighting
• Quality Control
• Corrective and preventive action
• Quality Auditing
9. Customer and Supplier Relationships
• Identifying Markets and Creating Demand
• Identifying Customer Needs
• The Marketing Vision Statement
• Pricing Strategy
• Sell on quality, not on price
• Supply Chain Management
• The Value of Time in Transportation Activities
• Freight Management Systems [Ford had a very sophisticated FMS to support his inventory-lean factories]
• Supplier Development
10. Frederick Winslow Taylor and Scientific Management
• Did Taylor Influence Ford?
• Correlation between Ford's Principles and Scientific Management
• Scientific Management, Lean Manufacturing, and Kaizen Blitz
• Taylor and Motion Efficiency
• Break the job into steps
• The Truth Behind Taylorism
• Taylor and labor relations
• Taylor on dysfunctional labor relations
• Labor's response to Taylor
• Management and labor as partners
• Dysfunctional performance measurements
• Management by wandering around (MBWA)
• Principles for Change Management
• Use Visible Successes to Promote Change
• Involve Those Whom the Change Affects
• An Experimental Design Tragedy
11. The Influence of Benjamin Franklin [Benjamin Franklin laid the "foundation" of lean manufacturing; Ford, who read Franklin's books, built the "house" more than a hundred years later!]
• Franklin on Waste
• On waste avoidance and the cost of quality
• On inventory
• On government waste
• Franklin on Initiative, Self-Reliance, and Persistence
• Success as failure
• Franklin on Money
• On speculators

Equation 8-1, which is important for understanding how Ford apparently achieved the impossible-- running a balanced production line at close to 100 percent capacity-- should read as follows. Also, the u/(1u) that appears on the page should be u/(1-u).