Lean’s Crazy Relatives | Jim Womack | Planet Lean [Review]

Michel Baudin‘s comments: First, thanks to Bob Emiliani, for bringing this article to my attention through his own critique of it. I disagree with the article too, but for different reasons. Womack wants to put a distance between his Lean and the legacy of Taylor and Ford, by branding them “crazy relatives.”

I see them as precursors, alongside many others, not crazy relatives. When implementing concepts from Toyota outside Japan, it is better salesmanship to embrace local precursors and stand on their shoulders than to dismiss them. Lean/TPS goes down easier when presented as a new chapter in an existing, familiar story than as an alien approach, and I believe this is why Toyota’s PR literature emphasizes the link to Ford.

That we embrace precursors doesn’t mean that we follow them, but that what we do today is built on the useful parts of their legacies. For their contributions, Taylor and Ford have earned a place in the pantheon of Manufacturing, together with, among others:

• Frank and Lillian Gilbreth for their work on motion studies
• Charles Sorensen, P.E. Martin and Clarence Avery for inventing the assembly line at Ford
• J. Walter Dietz for TWI
• W. Edwards Deming and J.M. Juran in quality.

And this just to mention a few Americans. Likewise, in other countries, you are better off acknowledging local forefathers like:

• Frank Woollard for flow manufacturing in the UK
• Hugo Junkers in Germany for the “Taktsystem” in aircraft assembly
• Karol Adamiecki in Poland for his harmonograms, now known as Gantt Charts
• Alexei Gastev in Russia for his work on operator job design
• …

In addition, Taylor and Ford were so different from one another that they don’t really belong in a list together. Taylor was an individual thinker, capable of formulating theories based on his experience, and his contributions are not limited to time studies. He wrote his own books and never acted like a crazy relative.

Henry Ford, on the other hand, was an entrepreneur who built what was for over a decade the largest manufacturing organization on the planet, making more cars in the early 1920s than all of his worldwide competitors together. He worked through others and even his books were ghostwritten by Samuel Crowther. Ford was no intellectual, there is no evidence of any ability on his part to conceptualize what he did. After he had made his main contributions, by about 1920, he did become a “crazy relative,” signing  anti-semitic rants that are an embarrassment for his descendants to this day, and cozying up to Nazis.

Womack asserts that Ford was awarded medals by both Hitler and Stalin. There is a picture of him receiving a Nazi medal in 1938. Ford did build a plant to make Model As in the Soviet Union in 1929, but I couldn’t find any trace of Henry Ford receiving a medal from the Soviets. Womack’s article uses a shot of a Volkswagen assembly line in the early 1950s as a featured image. Yes, the Wolfsburg Volkswagen plant was inspired by the Ford River Rouge plant, but I am not sure what this has to do with Henry Ford being a crazy relative at a Lean family party.

Womack says that proponents of Lean suffer from being branded “taylorists” or “fordists,” but being branded a “toyotist” or any other kind of “-ist” is not much better, as it carries a connotation of closed-minded sectarian thinking. It is often used in politics but not in science. You don’t hear about “newtonism” or “einsteinism.” Sometimes you hear about “darwinism,” from people who want to downgrade evolution from established science to an opinion.

Womack starts his last paragraph with “The lean movement over 100 years…” As I recall, however, the word “Lean” was not in use in this context before 1989. Anything done before then was therefore a precursor.