Henry Ford's 1926 sequel to My Life and Work, also written with Samuel Crowther, detailing his mature philosophy of industrial management. Taiichi Ohno acknowledged that a key stimulus to the Toyota Production System and just-in-time manufacturing came from reading this book, making it a direct ancestor of lean manufacturing.
This is the book that taught Taiichi Ohno how to build the Toyota Production System. Ohno said Ford's writing on standardization and the nature of waste was 'orthodox and universal.' The specific idea Ohno took was Ford's system of moving production backward from the customer rather than pushing inventory forward — the origin of pull-based manufacturing that became just-in-time.
For a modern founder, the book is a reminder that operational philosophy is a durable competitive advantage. Ford was writing about exactly-on-time delivery of materials to the assembly line in 1926, and Toyota built a global manufacturing empire from the same ideas forty years later. The principles outlasted both men.