Notes from Toyota-land

Notes from Toyota-land PDF Author: Darius Mehri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728792
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In 1996, Darius Mehri traveled to Japan to work as a computer simulation engineer within the Toyota production system. Once there, he found a corporate experience far different from what he had expected. Notes from Toyota-land, based on a diary that Mehri kept during his three years at an upper-level Toyota group company, provides a unique insider's perspective on daily work life in Japan and charts his transformation from a wide-eyed engineer eager to be part of the "Japanese Miracle" to a social critic, troubled by Japanese corporate practices. Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings. As both an engaging memoir of cross-cultural misunderstanding and a primer on Japanese business and industrial practices, Notes from Toyota-land will be a revelation to everyone who believes that Japanese business practices are an ideal against which to measure success.

Notes from Toyota-land

Notes from Toyota-land PDF Author: Darius Mehri
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501728792
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 252

Get Book

Book Description
In 1996, Darius Mehri traveled to Japan to work as a computer simulation engineer within the Toyota production system. Once there, he found a corporate experience far different from what he had expected. Notes from Toyota-land, based on a diary that Mehri kept during his three years at an upper-level Toyota group company, provides a unique insider's perspective on daily work life in Japan and charts his transformation from a wide-eyed engineer eager to be part of the "Japanese Miracle" to a social critic, troubled by Japanese corporate practices. Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings. As both an engaging memoir of cross-cultural misunderstanding and a primer on Japanese business and industrial practices, Notes from Toyota-land will be a revelation to everyone who believes that Japanese business practices are an ideal against which to measure success.

Worker Leadership

Worker Leadership PDF Author: Fred Stahl
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262317281
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
How to increase both job satisfaction and enterprise productivity—and make American manufacturing competitive again. How can American manufacturing recapture its former dominance in the globalized industrial economy? In Worker Leadership, Fred Stahl proposes a strategy to boost enterprise productivity and restore America's industrial power. Stahl outlines a revolutionary transformation of industrial culture that offers workers real control of production operations and manufacturing processes (as well as a monetary share of the savings from productivity gains). Stahl develops this new Theory of Worker Productivity into a strategy of Worker Leadership, with concrete, real-world examples. Combining some of the methods of lean manufacturing made famous by Toyota with genuine worker empowerment unlike anything at Toyota, Worker Leadership creates highly productive jobs loaded with responsibility and authority. Workers, Stahl writes, love these jobs precisely because of the opportunities to be creative and productive. Worker Leadership also offers important benefits for organized labor. It promotes the vitality and growth of labor unions through a shared responsibility with management for growth and profitability. Stahl's approach was inspired by changes implemented at John Deere factories by a general manager named Dick Kleine. Stahl uses the story of Kleine's transformation of the Deere factories to construct a checklist of essential conditions for Worker Leadership. He also discusses competition with China and South Korea and tells the story of production that GE recently “reshored” from China to the United States. Stahl considers the potential for applying Worker Leadership beyond manufacturing, provides a brief history of manufacturing, and even reveals the dark side of Toyota's system that opens another competitive opportunity for America. Worker Leadership offers a blueprint for global competitive advantage that should be read by anyone concerned about America's current productivity paralysis.

Condensed Capitalism

Condensed Capitalism PDF Author: Daniel Sidorick
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501707426
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Corporations often move factories to areas where production costs, notably labor, taxes, and regulations, are sharply lower than in the original company hometowns. Not every company, however, followed this trend. One of America's most iconic firms, the Campbell Soup Company, was one such exception: it found ways to achieve low-cost production while staying in its original location, Camden, New Jersey, until 1990. The first in-depth history of the Campbell Soup Company and its workers, Condensed Capitalism is also a broader exploration of strategies that companies have used to keep costs down besides relocating to cheap labor havens: lean production, flexible labor sourcing, and uncompromising antiunionism. Daniel Sidorick's study of a classic firm that used these methods for over a century has, therefore, special relevance in current debates about capital mobility and the shifting powers of capital and labor. Sidorick focuses on the engine of the Campbell empire: the soup plants in Camden where millions of cans of food products rolled off the production line daily. It was here that management undertook massive efforts to drive down costs so that the marketing and distribution functions of the company could rely on a limitless supply of products to sell at rock-bottom prices. It was also here that thousands of soup makers struggled to gain some control over their working lives and livelihoods, countering company power with their own strong union local. Campbell's low-cost strategies and the remarkable responses these elicited from its workers tell a story vital to understanding today's global economy. Condensed Capitalism reveals these strategies and their consequences through a narrative that shows the mark of great economic and social forces on the very human stories of the people who spent their lives filling those familiar red-and-white cans.

The Marketing Mavens

The Marketing Mavens PDF Author: Noel Capon
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307394476
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The way far too many people at far too many companies think about and execute marketing was born in an era when suppliers-the companies generating products and services-were in the catbird seat. That world is long dead, and customers now occupy that position. In this relentlessly globalizing economy, we live in a world of oversupply and underdemand, with too many suppliers chasing too few customers, offering more goods and services than the market can absorb. Noel Capon set out to discover what differentiates people who know how to succeed in this changed world-people who are able to create customers for the products and services of their business. The Marketing Mavens is based on a four-year-long research program that spanned twenty-five industries, identifying long-term winners and what they do differently. Put simply, Marketing Mavens place customers at the center of their business and make marketing everyone’s job. Using a wide variety of intriguing, in-depth examples, from ESPN to the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Capon shows how the mavens create customers. How by placing the sports fan at the center of its business, ESPN creates programming that meets the needs of fans that were never given a second thought by the networks; or how physicians at the Mayo Clinic, being both technical experts and skilled at creating a patient-centric ambience, motivate people to pay the extra travel and lodging expenses not covered by insurance. Marketing Mavens, though a rare breed, can be found up and down an organization-from the CEO to chief marketing officers to business unit managers. Noel Capon has talked to mavens from across the global economy and brings forth their uncanny insights behind the five imperatives of the true Marketing Maven: • Picking markets that matter • Selecting segments to dominate and finding the sweet spot in that segment • Designing the offer to create customer value and secure differential advantage • Integrating to serve the customer • And measuring what matters Noel Capon in The Marketing Mavens redefines marketing, moving it from a focus on selling and communication into a discipline that guides all the key decisions of a business. By seeing marketing as everyone’s business-not the domain of a few specialists-you’ll get your business in step with the way the world really works . . . and start creating customers. Next year’s profits don’t depend on next year’s numbers but on next year’s customers. The Marketing Mavens points the way to those customers, profits, and an increased stock price.

The Andalucian Friend

The Andalucian Friend PDF Author: Alexander Soderberg
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0770436064
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Enemies are everywhere in this monumental international crime thriller that Brad Thor calls "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets The Sopranos." Hector Guzman has fooled many women. With his quiet charm, easy smile, and smooth demeanor it's easy to fall into his trap, and Sophie Brinkmann, a widowed single mother, is no exception. She quickly learns, though, that his sleek façade masks something sinister. Guzman is the head of a powerful international crime ring with a reach into drugs and weaponry that extends from Europe to South America. His interests are under siege by a ruthless German syndicate who will stop at nothing to stake its claim. But the Guzmans are a family of fighters and will wage war to protect what’s rightfully theirs. When Sophie is unwittingly caught in the crossfire, she must summon everything within her to navigate the intricate web of moral ambiguity, deadly obsession, and craven gamesmanship.

The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production

The Cambridge International Handbook of Lean Production PDF Author: Thomas Janoski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108341403
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 890

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Book Description
This handbook focuses on two sides of the lean production debate that rarely interact. On the one hand, management and industrial engineering scholars have presented a positive view of lean production as the epitome of efficiency and quality. On the other hand, sociology, industrial relations, and labor relations scholars focus on work speedups, management by stress, trade union positions, and self-exploitation in lean teams. The editors of this volume understand the merits of both views and present them accordingly, bridging the gaps among five disciplines and presenting the best of each perspective. Chapters by internationally acclaimed authors examine the positive, negative and neutral possible effects of lean, providing a global view of lean production while adjusting lean to the cultural and political contexts of different nation-states. As the first multi-lens view of lean production from academic and consultant perspectives, this volume charts a way forward in the world of work and management in our global economy.

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism PDF Author: Michael Perelman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1583672621
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Mainstream, or more formally, neoclassical, economics claims to be a science. But as Michael Perelman makes clear in his latest book, nothing could be further from the truth. While a science must be rooted in material reality, mainstream economics ignores or distorts the most fundamental aspect of this reality: that the vast majority of people must, out of necessity, labor on behalf of others, transformed into nothing but a means to the end of maximum profits for their employers. The nature of the work we do and the conditions under which we do it profoundly shape our lives. And yet, both of these factors are peripheral to mainstream economics. By sweeping labor under the rug, mainstream economists hide the nature of capitalism, making it appear to be a system based upon equal exchange rather than exploitation inside every workplace. Perelman describes this illusion as the "invisible handcuffs" of capitalism and traces its roots back to Adam Smith and his contemporaries and their disdain for working people. He argues that far from being a basically fair system of exchanges regulated by the "invisible hand" of the market, capitalism handcuffs working men and women (and children too) through the very labor process itself. Neoclassical economics attempts to rationalize these handcuffs and tells workers that they are responsible for their own conditions. What we need to do instead, Perelman suggests, is eliminate the handcuffs through collective actions and build a society that we direct ourselves.

Transforming Culture

Transforming Culture PDF Author: E. Briody
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 023010617X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
Transforming Culture offers a discussion and exploration of American work culture that can serve as a guide for organizational-culture change through the description and explanation of a model for change used at GM. The book describes the model, discusses culture-change tools that were derived from it and descriptions of how the tools work.

Toyota Gas Pedals

Toyota Gas Pedals PDF Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description


30-Second Engineering

30-Second Engineering PDF Author: James Trevelyan
Publisher:
ISBN: 1782408371
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Major buildings, energy supply systems, chemical plants, food processing, and aircraft are all examples of engineering today. Despite such diversity, nearly all engineering fields rely on common principles and methods, and there is remarkable similarity in the daily work of engineers. Engineers spend most effort organising and coordinating collaborative work by all the diverse people involved, guided by their technical knowledge and experience. Unlike physics or biology, where immutable laws underpin the study, the essence of engineering is found in how theory is applied judgementally. To quickly grasp the nature of engineering the fifty summaries in 30-Second Engineering outlines types of engineering from mechanical to chemical; the universal stages of a collaborative engineering project; and the key ways engineering can solve the challenges of our future earth.