The Machine That Changed The World

...is the title of a book by James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos. It's subtitled How Lean Production Revolutionized the Global Car Wars. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:
In striking contrast to the mass-production plant, where stopping the line was the responsibility of the senior line manager, Ohno placed a cord above every work station and instructed workers to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that they couldn't fix. Then the whole team would come over to work on the problem.
Lean distribution will form the front end of a system that is driven by the needs of the customer, not by the needs of the factory.
The ultimate cause is almost always an organizational problem.
Workers at mass-production plants learn no skills.
Japanese companies do not believe they can turn around existing mass-production facilities.
In Japan...practically all hiring in companies is from the bottom only.
Anything that is new is likely to be misunderstood, typically by attempts to explain the new phenomenon in terms of traditional categories and causes.
The central problem is people - how to reward and motivate thousands of individuals from many countries and cultures so that they work in harmony.