In one of those odd, looping historical moments, one of the head engineers at Toyota, Taiichi Ohno, went to the United States on an R&D junket to visit automobile factories. This was 1956 and somewhere between stops on his trip, he stumbled into an American supermarket. Like those shrieking Italian women, he was stunned by the abundance. Nothing similar existed in Japan. But rather than the food, his engineer eyes were drawn to a different delight. The workflow.
