Number of words: 631 In 1950, as part of the occupation effort of putting a demotic Japan back on its economic feet, Deming was invited to teach in Tokyo. There he preached his gospel of using statistics for quality control by recording quality performance and analyzing it, then altering processes to improve quality and measuring … Read more

Number of words: 807 Start with Toyota’s history and the world into which it emerged. It may seem surprising, but Toyota’s success owes a lot to America. It all started when an American naval officer, Commodore Matthew Perry, in 1853 sailed into Tokyo Bay with his so-called black ships to force the Japanese authorities to … Read more

Number of words: 184 Andrew Gould, chairman of Schlumberger, a French-American oil services giant, points out that twenty-five years ago, only one-sixth of exploration wells were successful, while two-thirds are today. Over that time, the success rate for development wells has risen from about 33 percent to nearly 100 percent. He is convinced that the … Read more

Number of words: 170 “Oil is found in the minds of men.” So says a bumper sticker popular among petroleum engineers. True enough. In 1859, Colonel Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania by drilling, rather than digging, for oil; he adapted the old Chinese trick of drilling for salt. That prompted the world’s first oil … Read more

Number of words: 273 Modern America and automobile grew up together. But like so many early-twentieth-century Americans, it was born elsewhere. “Automobile” is a French word. The nursery of the industry was France. In 1900, just seven years after the French people gave the United States the Statue of Liberty as a belated centennial birthday … Read more