Tags: How Toyota Became the World’s Best Manufacturer

In the 1950s, Ohno returned to the place he understood best, the shop floor, and went to work to change the rules of the game. He did not have a big consulting firm, Post-it® notes,...

When Eiji Toyoda and his managers took their 12-week study tour of U.S plants in 1950, they were expecting to be dazzled by their manufacturing progress. Instead they were surprised that the development of mass...

Toyota Motor Corporation struggled through the 1930s, primarily making simple trucks. In the early years, the company produced poor-quality vehicles with primitive technology (e.g., hammering body panels over logs) and had little success. In the...

His “mistake-proof” loom became Toyoda’s most popular model, and in 1929 he sent his son, Kiichiro, to England to negotiate the sale of the patent rights to Platt Brothers, the premier maker of spinning and...

The story begins with Sakichi Toyoda, a tinkerer and inventor, not unlike Henry Ford, who grew up in the late 1800s in a remote farming community outside of Nagoya. At that time, weaving was a...