Our book Rebirth of American Industry is getting close to its publishing date.
Brian Maskell gave us the first review:
Review of
“Rebirth of American Industry”
by William Waddell and Norman Bodek
This
excellent book will make some enemies. It is outspoken, hard-hitting, and
correct. The authors answer the
question “why 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 authors show that the management methods and
accounting systems developed by Alfred Sloan and Pierre Dupont at General
Motors are fundamentally in opposition to lean thinking, yet these methods are
ubiquitous and are even written into some of our laws and many of our
accounting standards.
Companies that try to implement lean tools in
production without dismantling and reinventing their management and accounting
methods are doomed to failure. When senior managers focus on stock price and
margins it is impossible for operations people to succeed with lean
manufacturing beyond some production improvement.
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.
Brian
H. Maskell, President of BMA Inc., - author of
Performance
Measurement for World Class Manufacturing (1991), Software and the Agile Manufacturer
(1993), New Performance Measures (1994), Making the Numbers Count;
the accountant as an agent of change (1996), and the software product
Putting Performance Measurement to Work (1999)
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