My Toaster's Grandfather

Authors Ronald and Lucinda Buckley have written a unique book in that the story is told by the product being manufactured - a toaster. This is a short book that could easily be read during a coast-to-coast plane ride. They use the toaster and his Grandfather to show how using the latest management techniques can convert a poor-performing money-losing business with low quality into a very profitable efficient business with the highest quality output. This makes these concepts, which tend to be unnecessarily complicated, easier to understand by all. The book's intended audience is virtually anybody involved in the process of making anything. The book should be read by not only management, but direct labor employees as well. The story is about a toaster that is created in the same factory that his Grandfather was created in. Contrasts are made between how the Grandfather and Grandson were created and adopted into their current home. For a time they sit side-by-side on the same counter and share stories of how they were built - Grandfather's coils are twice as thick as his Grandson's and he is built to last as he was built at a time when toasters were an expensive item and no one would dream of buying a toaster made in a low cost country. However, these are different times and competition has made it necessary for business to cut costs. In fact, our toaster never got to know his parents because they were early failures - the result of trying to keep up with cheap foreign imports by cutting corners that degraded product quality and drove the toaster factory they were created in to the brink of bankruptcy.The home our Grandfather and Grandson reside in just happens to be the home of the toaster factory owner - Sally, who inherited the broken factory from her Father. This is great because Sally is the "Lean Leader" who has taken responsibility for fixing her Father's factory along with her husband Bill. Sally and Bill spend a lot of time in the kitchen talking about how they are converting the factory to a Lean factory using Six Sigma Mistake Proofing methodologies and employee empowering self-directed work teams with various, problem-solving techniques to convert the factory to a highly profitable lean moneymaking business.