Number of words: 499 In 1894, Le Petit journal of Paris organized the world’s first endurance race for “vehicles without horses.” The race was held on the 80-mile route from Paris to Rouen, and the purse was a juicy 5,000 francs. The rivals used all manner of fuels, ranging from steam to electric batteries to … Read more

Number of words: 302 Toward the end of World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt attended a summit that changed the course of world history. No, net the famous meeting at Yalta, with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. Immediately after that gathering, Roosevelt traveled quietly to the USS Quincy, anchored in the Red Sea. The man … Read more

Number of words: 146 The essence of the Toyota story is that it is a company with a learning culture. It is a world-class heuristic device, a machine for promoting continuous self-education of the individuals and of the company culture. It first learned how to make mass production work more harmoniously than anywhere else in … Read more

Number of words: 140 Tetsuo Agata,in the later years of his long career, doubled as general manager of Toyota’s huge Honsha plant in the Toyota City complex and as the company’s overall manufacturing guru. Before that, he lived for years in America and has many American friends. One was a senior manager with Dow Chemical, … Read more

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: 190 The Big Three, with labor as a fixed cost and no freedom to cut earnings in bad times (as Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers could), were caught in an infernal cycle. They could not close factories quickly enough to adjust capacity to falling demand. This made them even less competitive against … 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