Lean management

Ford starts the ball rolling
Henry Ford continued this focus on waste while developing his mass assembly manufacturing system. Charles Buxton Going wrote in 1915:

Ford's success has startled thecountry, almost the world, financially, industrially, mechanically. It exhibits in higher degree than most persons would have thought possible the seemingly contradictory requirements of trueefficiency, which are: constant increase of quality, great increase of pay to the workers, repeated reduction in cost to the consumer. And with these appears, as at once cause and effect, an absolutelyincredible enlargement of output reaching something like one hundredfold in less than ten years, and an enormous profit to the manufacturer.[11]
Ford, in My Life and Work (1922),[12] provided asingle-paragraph description that encompasses the entire concept of waste:

I believe that the average farmer puts to a really useful purpose only about 5%. of the energy he expends.... Not only is everythingdone by hand, but seldom is a thought given to a logical arrangement. A farmer doing his chores will walk up and down a rickety ladder a dozen times. He will carry water for years instead of puttingin a few lengths of pipe. His whole idea, when there is extra work to do, is to hire extra men. He thinks of putting money into improvements as an expense.... It is waste motion— waste effort— thatmakes farm prices high and profits low.
Poor arrangement of the workplace—a major focus of the modern kaizen—and doing a job inefficiently out of habit—are major forms of waste even in modernworkplaces.

Ford also pointed out how easy it was to overlook material waste. A former employee, Harry Bennett, wrote:

One day when Mr. Ford and I were together he spotted some rust in the slag thatballasted the right of way of the D. T. & I [railroad]. This slag had been dumped there from our own furnaces. 'You know,' Mr. Ford said to me, 'there's iron in that slag. You make the crane crews who...