Episode Details

When Toyota was nearly bankrupt in 1949, they couldn't afford to be sloppy like American automakers. That constraint — poverty plus variety — forced them to invent the Toyota Production System, a radical approach where stopping the line became the path to quality. Meanwhile, Motorola's Bill Smith discovered that fewer manufacturing defects actually meant more field failures, leading to Six Sigma's counterintuitive insight: you can't inspect quality into a product. This episode explores how two companies facing existential problems cracked fundamentally different process innovations — and why the "Japanese culture" explanation collapses when you look at NUMMI.