Books on lean management and the Toyota Production System are too often presented as if this system has been a virtual heaven of production efficiency and worker satisfaction. In the author’s enthusiasm, questions about...
Read MoreSome companies have engaged in what they think are “lean implementations” by reducing lean to component parts and experimenting with one component over there, another over here, and a third somewhere else. That is guaranteed to fail. The very idea of reducing lean to its component parts fails to “get it.” I believe that the first principle of meta-lean is what I called in a previous book, The Unity Principle. Honda took this principle to heart and sought to apply it in their U.S. operations.
Read MoreLean Management Systems: The New Modern Management Lean management systems are becoming the twenty-first century standard. Many years ago one of the first books I read on management was Peter Drucker’s The Practice of...
Read MoreLast week I was at a client and I was explaining some point of lean culture and I used an example from Toyota. The union president who was in attendance stood up and said “I’ll tell you one thing, you better not tell us to do anything because Toyota did it. Ten people in the past week have come up to me and told me that we aren’t doing anything because Toyota does it.” That about sums up the sentiment out there.
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