Research
In-depth articles that go beyond surface-level lean — examining what the original Japanese sources actually say, how Toyota really practices these methods, and where common interpretations go wrong.
Kenya Nakamura: The First Chief Engineer
Kenya Nakamura built Toyota's first chief engineer (shusa) role through sheer force of will on the original Crown — and put the 'soul' into a system that became Toyota's signature advantage in product development. The story of the man who built a 2,000-ton press, then Japan's first true domestic passenger car.
Tatsuo Hasegawa: The Architect of the Shusa System
Kenya Nakamura proved one strong leader could pull a car together. Tatsuo Hasegawa — an aeronautical engineer who designed high-altitude interceptors before the war — made it a system: target costing borrowed from aircraft weight budgets, the '80-point plus alpha' philosophy, the Product Planning Office, and the Ten Principles of the chief engineer.
One Hundred Years of PDCA Thinking
The full history of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle — from Taylor and Shewhart in America to Mizuno and Ishikawa in Japan. Most people attribute PDCA to Deming, who neither created it nor fully endorsed it. The real story is far more interesting.
The Machine That Changed the World at 35
Still the most comprehensive, empirical, enterprise-level explanation of Toyota ever produced — and the most important work ever written on what came to be called Lean. A retrospective review of why Machine remains the defining work, 35 years later.
Toyota Product Development History
A structured history of Toyota's product development engineering organization, tracing its evolution from a small automotive group inside a loom manufacturer in the 1930s to today's mobility-era development structures.