Taiichi Ohno Audiobooks

Toyota Production System: lean manufacturing set out by the engineer who devised it

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Who is Taiichi Ohno?

Taiichi Ohno (1912 to 1990) was a Japanese industrial engineer and businessman, and one of the most quietly influential figures in modern industry. He is regarded as the father of the Toyota Production System, the approach to manufacturing that went on to inspire Lean Manufacturing in the United States.

Ohno’s great contribution was a way of seeing waste. He identified the seven wastes – muda, in Japanese – as part of the system, and he set out his thinking in several books, including Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production. Few engineers can claim to have changed how the world thinks about work itself; Ohno has a better claim than most.

Taiichi Ohno in audiobooks

Our catalogue offers Toyota Production System, the foundational statement of Ohno’s method, straight from the source. Business listening lives or dies by clarity of thought, and this is thinking of unusual discipline: where waste hides inside everyday processes, and what it takes to strip it out. For UK listeners in operations, manufacturing or management, there is a bracing pleasure in hearing first principles set out by the man who devised them – not a summary, not a consultant’s remix, but the origin of the system that inspired lean manufacturing. Dry in places, certainly; foundational everywhere else.