Thinkers Timeline

Taiichi Ohno (1912-1990) was a Japanese industrial engineer whose work at the Toyota Motor Company produced the Toyota Production System, a way of organising manufacturing that has since spread worldwide under names including lean manufacturing and just-in-time production. He was born in 1912 in Dalian, then in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, where his father worked. He graduated from what is now Nagoya Technical High School in 1932 and joined Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, a textile machinery company run by the Toyoda family. In 1943 he moved to Toyota Motor Company, the automobile manufacturer that the same family had founded. He would remain there for the rest of his career. He started as a shop-floor supervisor and rose through operational roles, eventually becoming executive vice president in 1975. His rise came through his practical work on the production line, not through the management hierarchy. Starting in the late 1940s and continuing through the 1950s and 1960s, he developed the production methods that would make Toyota one of the most efficient and quality-focused manufacturers in the world. The methods were not written down in any comprehensive way for decades; they were transmitted through the practice of production workers and engineers trained by Ohno himself. Workshops and demonstrations — not textbooks — were his teaching methods. His short book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, published in Japanese in 1978 and in English in 1988, remains the most direct source for his ideas. Western interest in his work exploded in the 1980s when American manufacturers began realising that they had been outcompeted by Japanese firms using methods they did not understand. He retired from Toyota in 1978 and died in Toyota City in 1990.