In this relative economy of means we can begin to see why there is such an accumulated disparity between Toyota and its American rivals. Ohno’s vision might be called ‘economies of flow’. He remarked that manufacturing should be thought of as a supermarket in which, as a customer pulls a product off the shelf, a little factory behind the shelf makes a new one to put in its place. Crucially, this means that variety must be in the line. To retain economies of flow, the same line must be able to make different models without missing a beat. In the American system, the function of people on the production line was (and is) to do what the management factory tells them. They are, as Chaplin portrayed in Modern times, literally cogs in the machine. The decisions are removed from the work and are used to ‘control’ people and work (although in the larger sense this control is illusory, because production is unconnected to real demand). Ohno saw that the TPS could not work in this way; nor did he want it to, since the humanization of work was one of the explicit aims of the TPS. Instead, he asked what the people who carried out the work needed to handle the variety as each different model passed down the line. The result was the development of a system that managed flow using the people working within it as the principal agents. This simple act, integrating decision-making with the work, produced a wholly different management infrastructure—and indeed philosophy. The American model is command and control: regulation by management, with its battery of computer and other informational aids. The TPS model depends on regulation by the customer, with workers responding to customer needs and managers making it easier for them to do so: in other words on system learning.