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...designers before applying to teach at London's prestigious Central Saint Martin's College of Art and Design. He didn't get the job, but he was offered a coveted space in the graduate program. In 1992, by then discovered and championed by Blow, he started his own line upon graduation. (See pictures of models falling down...
...just too wasteful and expensive for Japan. Toyota had to learn to do more with less. The result was TPS - or, more generically, lean manufacturing. Inventories were all but eliminated by employing just-in-time delivery techniques, in which suppliers brought components to the assembly line only when needed...
...Japanese for "continuous improvement." In practice, it's the idea of empowering those people closest to a work process so they can participate in designing and improving it, rather than, say, spending every shift merely whacking four bolts to secure the front seat as each car moves down the line. Continuous improvement constantly squeezes excess labor and material out of the manufacturing process: people and parts meet at the optimal moment. Kaizen is also about spreading what you've learned throughout the system. And then repeating it. It's the reason, for instance, that when Toyota assumed full control...
...Sakichi Toyoda developed another concept, jidoka, or "automation with a human touch." Think of it as built-in stress detection. At Toyota, that means work stops whenever and wherever a problem occurs. (Any employee can pull a cord to shut down the line if there is a problem.) That way, says Steven Spear of MIT, author of Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and an expert in the dynamics of high-performance companies, "When I see something that's not perfect, I call it out, figure out what it is that I don't know and convert...
...Papandreou's government is walking a difficult line. It's been trying to convince its European partners - as well as the global markets - that it is taking serious steps to cut state spending and tackle its deficit without causing civil unrest at home. But the choice may soon be out of Greece's hands, and Papandreou must know that any outside assistance is likely to come with strings attached...