The Darker Side of Lean: An Insider's Perspective on the Realities of the Toyota Production System

Abstract

Executive Overview The Toyota Production System (TPS) has been lauded as the pinnacle of flexible, just-in-time manufacturing and design and the founder of “lean work” systems, which claim to improve product quality and employee productivity. American automobile manufacturers readily adopted the “Toyota Way” and many of the management practices in service industries, such as Total Quality Management (TQM) are biased on its fundamental principles. The author of this paper, Darius Mehri, is an American-born computer simulation engineer who worked in a Toyota group company for three years, observing this system firsthand and conducting his own qualitative research on what he considers the true impact of lean work: the human cost. As a participant observer who was inculcated in Japanese social and workplace culture, Mehri takes an examination of TPS well beyond what many studies American and European scholars have been able to go. His assessment is guided by a distinction which is fundamental to understanding...