For a young industrial engineer, Shubhendu Sharma couldn’t have landed a gig much sweeter than Toyota. As the originator of “just-in-time production,” Toyota pioneered the lean manufacturing movement that helped make it a dominant global automaker. But when a venerable Japanese forestry expert visited the company’s Bangalore factory to plant some greenery, Sharma was captivated by the idea of engineering a new kind of efficiency.
He wondered if Toyota’s wildly successful strategy for quickly and efficiently making cars could be applied to growing trees. The result is a startup called Afforestt.
In pitching his company, Sharma says the world loses about 36 football fields of forest in any given minute
Dispatches From The Front 