In the days when Toyota was first taking a huge share of the global automobile market and becoming the model for "lean" manufacturing, they were following Ford's lead.
One book on almost every Toyota executive's desk was Henry Ford's Today and Tomorrow. In the 1980s "lean manufacturing" was frequently pointed to as Japan's edge on American automakers, and words like kanban were entering the English language and becoming a part of training classes in a wide range of industries. Japanese management was a catch-phrase, and curiously enough, the Japanese managers everybody was scurrying to catch up to were reading Henry Ford.
American publisher Norman Bodek travelled to Japan, and published the books of Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo in English. While there, he discovered that most of these productivity gurus had Henry Ford's book on their desk. Today and Tomorrow had fallen out of print in English, but the Japanese version was thriving. Not only that, but Ohno's book Toyota Production System clearly names Ford's book as the basis upon which Toyota built their success.
Economy is a word that was first regularly applied to cars with the advent of fuel-efficient small cars like the Toyota Corolla, but it is a word that also very well describes the Model T Ford as well as Henry Ford's approach to both design and manufacturing in the early days of the Ford Motor Company. Ford's Highland Park Plant was his vision, and it was the vision adopted by Toyota.
