Deming was about quality control, which dovetails into lean: you can only do the latter if you know your parts bin is good, and that you can trust your supplier/s to deliver.

In that sense, lean is essentially the same solution as reducing buffer size to increase network throughout.

Excess capacity pooling decreases stopages but prevents signalling of problems back through the chain.

Do you have some links for the history? I'm interested in Lean and Kaizen. Made a comment about it in this thread.

It's covered a little in the TAL episode on NUMMI[1]. There's also a bit of it involved with TWI[2][3]. I'd read some other interesting things about skill transfer post-WW2 with the Marshall Plan but having trouble finding the original source material.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/403/nummi-2010

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Training_Within_Industry#Post_...

[3] https://twi-institute.org/training-within-industry/history/

This part from your link [2] is interesting:

>In the Foreword to Dinero's book "Training Within Industry", John Shook relates a story in which a Toyota trainer brought out an old copy of a TWI service manual to prove to him that American workers at NUMMI could be taught using the "Japanese" methods used at Toyota. Thus, TWI was the forerunner of what is today regarded as a Japanese creation.

Great, will check those links out, thank you.