Conversations with Taiichi Ohno: Management Insights for the Digital Age - Paperback

by Bob Emiliani (Author)

What if you could sit across from Taiichi Ohno - architect of the Toyota Production System - and ask him the questions managers have been getting wrong for forty years?

In Conversations with Taiichi Ohno, the author imagines five days of dialogue with TPS's architect, drawing on Ohno's published books and personal kaizen experiences to elaborate on the parts of his thinking that most peple consistently miss.

The format is question-and-answer, with the imagined Ohno blunt and sometimes impatient - in keeping with the directness of his actual personality.

Topics extend beyond familiar territory like kaizen, flow, and developing people into subjects Ohno never addressed himself: artificial intelligence, e-commerce, and digital automation. The throughline is a careful argument that TPS is a management system better suited to the digital age than to the industrial one in which it was born.

Each chapter closes with reflection prompts, allowing the book to function as a personal workbook.