Rebirth of American Industry: A Study of Lean Management

by William H. Waddell and Norman Bodek

Book Overview

We have a certain amount of sadness as we read of the bankruptcy of Delphi Corporation, and the losses and downsizing of General Motors (GM) and Ford. GM and Ford were the world leaders in automobile... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0971243638
• ISBN13: 9780971243637
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: PCs Press
• Length: 282 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

One of the most enlightening books I ever read (and I am not an Industrial Engineer)

A few years ago, I was at a football game, when I asked my best friend, who is an industrial engineer "What is all of this 'Lean' stuff I hear about?" He spent the next few years talking at length through examples and slides and presentations and e-mails from Bill Waddell's blogs. They were nice, but I didn't really 'get it'. I am a design engineer and my views before hand were that I don't understand business and those business leaders and accounting gurus just think at a higher level than me. Then my friend gave me his copy of this book. I figured I would probably never read it and give it back to him in a few months. I figured it was written for 'Industrial Engineer nerds' and would be above my head. One night, as I am about ready to go to bed, I pick it up and decide to look at chapter 1, so I can at least say I tried to read it. All I can say is WOW!!!! 3 chapters later, I look at the clock and decide I should go to bed, since it then way past my bedtime. I spent the next few days blowing through chapter after chapter (and staying up too late). The scales fell off of my eyes and suddenly I saw the absurdity of modern business thinking and the beauty of lean. Before, I thought Lean was something like the kanban cards I used to stock my kitchen (yes, my friend did teach me this) on a wider scale, but it is so much more. After this book, Bill's blogs made perfect sense. I started spreading the word to those around me about the absurdity of overhead absorption, lowest landed piece costs, making machines run around the clock when you don't need that many parts, creating bogus factory efficiency numbers, building unwanted inventory at the end of the quarter, and other absurd practices I noticed around me. Not only did Bill teach me lean, I was able to explain it to others. You can read reviews from lean manufacturing experts who read this book, but I hope you will take special notice when I tell you that I have ZERO background in manufacturing and was utterly clueless about all such things, and this book changed how I view manufacturing. It's not written for like-minded manufacturing gurus. It is written for all of us who just didn't get it.

Not just for manufacturing . . . .

Lean Six Sigma is being touted as the 'saviour' of performance management in the financial services industry. However it may simply be a refuge for the Black Belts from the manufacturing sector. I've wondered in the past why the considerable investment in Lean Six Sigma by Ford, GM and Delphi didn't pay off - now I'm beginning to understand. This is an important book that applies to all industries not just manufacturing.

What makes Lean work

First of all, You should know, that I have received a hand-signed copy of this book for free. While this has absolutely no influence on my opinion about the book, if You don't believe that, please read on with the next reviewer. In this book, Bill describes the hystory of manufacturing and management systems, starting from Henry Ford's legendary Highland Park plant, continuing with Eiji Toyoda creating the world's most famous car company, all the way to today's sad situation in GM, Ford and many other companies. In particular, Bill focusses on what lean manufacturing meant in Ford's early days, and how this was embedded and supported by a lean, cash-driven management system. He continues with describing, how this business system was applied and brought to perfection in Toyota. As a contrast to these success stories, Bill describes in great detail the long evolution path of most businesses from successful manufacturing companies supported by finance and marketing into collapsing finance and marketing corporations with ever decreasing manufacturing performance. Bill describes, how lean manufacturing with a strong focus on respect for people, quality, flow and synchronisation was as a natural result of a sound business system, combined with the need to create superior customer value with limited cash and the lack of a sophysticated controlling system. He also shows, how disregarding people, quality, flow and synchronisation lead to today's typical large corporations, hiring and firing people as variable costs, facing countless quality issues and carrying mountains of inventory, which physically stops the flow of products and cash. Bill describes the wrong assumptions, priorities and fundamental errors of the DuPont / Sloan management system and shows, how the poor manufacturing performance of most companies is the natural result of adopting this system. Bill calls for a radical change of what most of us treat for given, prooved and granted: the DuPont / Sloan management system. Decentralized command and controlling the key figures of cycle time (flow), total cost, quality, delivery performance and safety is what successful lean companies do and others, who truly want to become lean need to do as well. All in all, a very interesting book, answering the fundamental dilemma of lean manufacturing: why so many companies adopting lean tools, methods and techniques fail to obtain positive bottom-line results... it is because, they are still managed by a fundamentally wrong business system. In my opinion, there could be more real-life, tangible examples from our everyday business experience described in the book, in order to support the message. However, Bill's blog under www.evolvingexcellence.com more then compensates this, by giving us at least 1 every day.

"Manufacturing is important."

Rebirth of American Industry is an important book. It blows the lid off many of the assumptions, processes, and metrics that have led our country down a road that has shipped millions of jobs overseas. In order for the "Rebirth of American Industry" to take place, a great deal of pain will have to be incurred, unless we immediately challenge the existing norms and make some radical changes. Death of waste, the elimination of all non-value added activities, must be pursued relentlessly. Birth of a new American heritage of producing with increased value to the customer, designing and delivering products, and providing services under world class conditions is mandatory. In our free society the customer makes the choice of which products will be purchased and which will not. In a world of vast and instantly available information, with global competitors operating in our own backyards, the customer is indeed king. Companies that choose to ignore this fact do so at great peril. Newsmagazines and commentators have blasted Wal-Mart, big box retailers, and global competition for our problems in manufacturing. The truth is that educated, knowledgeable customers with virtually unlimited choices wield more power than ever before. Our failures in manufacturing are a result of failing to meet the needs of these customers. In the words of Walt Kelly's Pogo "We have met the enemy - and he is us." Just as the customer has been empowered under our free economy, we must move forward in educating and empowering our manufacturing employees to better serve that customer. We must align our strategies, business processes, and performance metrics to the voice of the customer, and aggressively go after our leaner, more agile competitors. This book provides a prescription that should lead American companies to return manufacturing to our shores, just as many of our global competitors have chosen to join us here.

Hard-hitting critique of the current state of Lean in America... and the opportunity

Over the past several months you've probably enjoyed Bill Waddell's hard-hitting posts on Superfactory's Evolving Excellence Blog (www.evolvingexcellence.com) as much as I have. His propensity to challenge the status quo with historical facts has been a breath of fresh air and has forced the lean community to think about the stability of its own foundation. Bill, in collaboration with Shingo Prize winning author Norman Bodek, has just released a new book, Rebirth of American Industry - A Study of Lean Management. In it he uses his in-your-face style to take issue with several commonly-held lean beliefs, and the companies that mistakenly believe they are lean. The book has already received considerably acclaim from early reviewers. Brian Maskell, President of BMA, Inc. and one of the leaders of the lean accounting movement, has this to say: "This excellent book will make some enemies. It is outspoken, hard-hitting, and correct. The authors answer the question "whay have so few American companies successfully transformed themselves into lean organizations". They take us back to the origins of lean at Ford Motor Company and Toyota, and contrast them with the modern American manufacturer. The solutions advocated will be unpopular because they cut to the heart of "professional" management theory and show that the lean transformation must start not on the shop-floor but by active transformation in the executive offices." Tom Johnson, author of Relevance Lost and the Shingo Prize winning Profit Beyond Measure, had this to say in the forward he wrote for the book: "The central concern of this book is to outline the core principles in the Sloan management model that GM adopted after 1920 and to show how adhering to those principles makes it virtually impossible for managers to understand and adopt the principles inherent in Toyota's so-called "lean" operating system. The book also does well at showing how the "magic" of MRP software after 1960 further disguised the dead-weight impact of overhead cost. The authors properly describe MRP as a sophisticated effort to rationalize the damage to sound operations caused by following the Sloan model. " I have always been fascinated by the history of lean, and this book does not disappoint. However as Bill points out in his introduction, this is not a history book... it is a management book. In any case, the supporting stories are priceless and help drive home the fallacies of the Sloan/Dupont ROI model. Such as Chrysler having 400,000 cars in finished goods at one point which required them to rent the empty Ford plant at Highland Park - ironically the birthplace of lean manufacturing - and they still believed they achieved a profit. As he has on this blog, he takes the Shingo Prize to task for awarding prizes to operations like Delphi that ended up failing the bottom line gut test of lean: they didn't make money. One of my favorite chapters is "The Illusion of MRP", perhaps because that's t