Toyota’s lean-production waste reduction targeted scarce labor and union power, not material scarcity.

Evidence

Ohno was thus responding to changing labor relations rather than to constraints in resources or to the specific nature of demand for automobiles in Japan. — Georg Schreyögg and Jörg Sydow, The Hidden Dynamics of Path Dependence, 181

Categorization

• CANDY: The counterintuitive kicker: Lean production’s origin lay in labor scarcity and unionization, not the resource scarcity usually cited.