A collection of conversations with key figures in TPS history, providing first-person accounts of how TPS developed. Published by the lean-enterprise-institute, 2009. Edited by Koichi Shimokawa and Takahiro Fujimoto, translated by Brian Miller and John Shook, with foreword by Jim Womack.
The centerpiece is the 1984 Ohno interview — a three-hour oral history conducted by Shimokawa and Fujimoto on July 16, 1984, in which taiichi-ohno recounted the entire development of TPS. The original Japanese transcript exists as a University of Tokyo CIRJE discussion paper (https://www.cirje.e.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/dp/97/j4/dp.pdf), and "The Birth of Lean" provides its first full English translation. Also includes interviews with eiji-toyoda and other Toyota veterans.
The book provides perspectives often missing from Western accounts — the internal politics, the resistance Ohno faced, the role of specific crises in driving TPS adoption, and the gradual, experimental nature of TPS development (vs. the retrospectively neat narrative of Western lean books). An invaluable primary source for anyone studying TPS origins.