Henry Ford (1863-1947), whose River Rouge plant and "Today and Tomorrow" (1926) were major influences on taiichi-ohno's thinking. Ford pioneered flow production — the moving assembly line that transformed manufacturing — but his system required enormous scale, massive inventories, and rigid standardization (famously, "any color so long as it's black"). Ohno admired Ford's commitment to flow but recognized that Toyota could not replicate Ford's scale. The central TPS question was: how do you achieve Ford's flow in small volumes with high variety? The answer — just-in-time, pull-production, smed for fast changeover, heijunka for mixed-model production — was TPS. When eiji-toyoda visited Ford's Rouge plant in 1950, he saw both the aspiration (continuous flow) and the limitation (inflexibility and waste). Ford's late-career book "Today and Tomorrow" was circulated among Toyota engineers and is considered a direct TPS influence. Eliyahu Goldratt (Theory of Constraints) argued in "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants" that Ford and Ohno are the two figures whose flow-based thinking underlies all modern production philosophy.