An article by Carlo Scodanibbio http://www.scodanibbio.com There is a problem in industry: we have gone into the 21st century with enterprises, organisations and business structures conceived and designed in the 18th and 19th centuries to perform well in the 20th... The principles that gave origin to industry were conceived back in 1776, when the British economist Adam Smith published his famous book entitled "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations". Considering that in those times there was practically no industry, some very excellent principles, conceived by a real genius, were laid out. Smith visualised that the future wealth of the world would be founded and based on industry. Smith went also a step further, engineering practical principles for the future would-be industry, including his famous principle of "Division of Labour" (the whole job to be sub-divided into a number of elementary tasks, each assigned to a dedicated, single-skill worker). Those principles, that originated the "first industrial revolution", were actually deployed and applied industrially only more than 100 years later, when the automotive industry was born. Introduced by Henry Ford at the beginning of the last century with the first industrial assembly chain, and then perfected in the 30's by Sloan, general manager of General Motors, Smith's principles proved to be operationally valid and effective: productivity was well acceptable, if not excellent. To continue reading and/or free-download this article and all "Lean" articles written by Carlo Scodanibbio go to http://www.scodanibbio.com/site/articles.html#lt