Inch by inch, car by car

Fast Company senior writer Charles Fishman wrote a very good book about Wal-Mart and, more recently, a feature about Wal-Mart’s plans to push compact fluorescent lightbulbs that caught the imagination of the entire enviroblogosphere. Now he has a new story, on how Toyota unflaggingly works to constantly improve its manufacturing processes, that is likely to be of interest to How the World Works readers.

One of the very first posts here, almost a year ago, looked at the huge losses being reported by GM and Ford and compared those companies unfavorably to Toyota, primarily because Toyota was busy making cars that consumers found increasingly attractive as gas prices rose, while Detroit had stayed fixated on humongo-vehicles. Fishman fleshes out another part of the story — Toyota’s success in inculcating a top-to-bottom corporate commitment to incremental improvement.
Incremental improvement isn’t sexy, but when you turn it into a way of life, you can achieve astonishing results. Fishman provides a slew of closely observed details of how it works from the factory floor at a huge Toyota plant in Georgetown, Ky. I especially liked these passages:

Salon