The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work

Frontline Workers Are the Best Guardians against Waste (Muda)
The following material is consistent with Tom Peters’ (1987) observation 
that the person who actually does a job knows more about it than any-
body else. It also makes it clear that Ford created a culture in which every 
employee learned to recognize waste that might otherwise hide in plain 
view; a skill that was among Ford’s primary success secrets. Note, for 
example, that the workers recognized deburring of gears as 100% rework, 
as opposed to a value-adding activity. The same applies to the operation 
that was necessary to straighten camshafts that warped during heat treat-
ment. The straightening “process” (and “process” implies a value-adding 
activity in value stream analysis) was actually 100% rework.
It is also particularly telling that the workforce was intolerant of a 
machining operation that ground 12% of the metal into easily recyclable 

---

86  •  The Expanded and Annotated My Life and Work
scrap; “… the mere fact that all waste is not a dead loss is no excuse for 
permitting waste.” Ford and Crowther (1926, p. 113) add: “Picking up and 
reclaiming the scrap left over after production is a public service, but plan-
ning so that there will be no scrap is a higher public service.”
This attitude can be compared to the acceptance of 80% or more 
machining waste in modern workplaces. Mege (2000) reports that many 
aerospace machining processes cut billets of aluminum into 15 to 20%