Synopses & Reviews
In their landmark book
The Machine That Changed the World, James Womack and Daniel Jones, two of the top industrial analysts in the world, explained how companies can dramatically improve their performance through the "lean production" approach pioneered by Toyota.
Lean Thinking extends these ideas to provide a rallying cry for today's corporate leaders.
After a decade of downsizing and reengineering, most companies in North America, Europe, and Japan are still stuck, searching for a formula for sustainable growth and success. The problem, as Womack and Jones explain in Lean Thinking, is that managers have lost sight of value for the customer and how to create it. By focusing on their existing organizations and outdated definitions of value, managers create waste, and the economies of the advanced countries continue to stagnate.
What's needed instead is lean thinking to help managers clearly specify value, to line up all the value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream, and to make value flow smoothly at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection. The first part of the book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples.
As Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates, these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry, routinely doubling both productivity and sales while stabilizing employment. But most managers will need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world -- including Pratt & Whitney, Porsche, and Toyota.
Even those readers who believe they have embraced lean thinking will discover in Part III that another dramatic leap is possible by creating a lean enterprise for each of their product families that tightly links all value-creating activities from concept to product launch, from order to delivery, and from raw materials into the arms of the consumer. This new concept takes the best features from the American, German, and Japanese industrial traditions and recombines them in a way that can be applied to every economic activity, from long-distance travel to construction to health care.
Lean Thinking does not provide a new management "program" for the one-minute manager. Instead, it offers a new way of thinking, being, and doing for the serious manager -- one that will change the world.
Review
Peter F. Drucker Author of The Post-Capitalist Society The Machine That Changed the World is a very important book. I am impressed.
Review
Business Week The best current book on the changes reshaping manufacturing, and the most readable, too...conveys a very human sense of managers constrained by limited resources yet trying to do better.
Review
Fortune A new and coherent thesis about automotive production...[the authors] back up their conclusions with unique statistical measures that are authoritative, extremely timely, and highly revealing. Think of this book as another step in the decade-long process of getting the attention of recalcitrant mass producers.
Review
Financial Times A revealing and compellingly readable account of Japan's achievement in revolutionizing manufacturing....An eye-opener even for those who already knew Japan didn't do it all with robots.
Review
Automotive News This is a book of great understanding, and of hope. It shows how to create an industrial world in which workers share the challenges and satisfactions of the business. It's a world in which assemblers communicate with suppliers and dealers in a way that improves life for all of them. Read it.
Review
Philip Caldwell Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company, 1980-1985 Truly remarkable....The most comprehensive, instructive, mind-stretching and provocative analysis of any major industry I have ever known. Why pay others huge consulting fees? Just read this book.
Review
Richard J. Schonberger Author of World Class Manufacturing: The Next Decade The manufacturing book of the nineties.
Synopsis
Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century.
Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century that supersedes the mass production system of Ford, the financial control system of Sloan, and the strategic system of Welch and GE. It is based on the Toyota (lean) model, which combines operational excellence with value-based strategies to produce steady growth through a wide range of economic conditions.
In contrast with the crash-and-burn performance of companies trumpeted by business gurus in the 1990s, the firms profiled in Lean Thinking -- from tiny Lantech to midsized Wiremold to niche producer Porsche to gigantic Pratt & Whitney -- have kept on keeping on, largely unnoticed, along a steady upward path through the market turbulence and crushed dreams of the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the leader in lean thinking -- Toyota -- has set its sights on leadership of the global motor vehicle industry in this decade.
Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value. (It's often not at all what existing organizations and assets would suggest.) The next step is to line up value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream while eliminating activities (usually the majority) that don't add value. Then the lean thinker creates a flow condition in which the design and the product advance smoothly and rapidly at the pull of the customer (rather than the push of the producer). Finally, as flow and pull are implemented, the lean thinker speeds up the cycle of improvement in pursuit of perfection. The first part of this book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples.
Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates that these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry in any country. But most managers need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of more than fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world.
Even those readers who believe they have embraced lean thinking will discover in Part III that another dramatic leap is possible by creating an extended lean enterprise for each of their product families that tightly links value-creating activities from raw materials to customer.
In Part IV, an epilogue to the original edition, the story of lean thinking is brought up-to-date with an enhanced action plan based on the experiences of a range of lean firms since the original publication of Lean Thinking.
Lean Thinking does not provide a new management "program" for the one-minute manager. Instead, it offers a new method of thinking, of being, and, above all, of doing for the serious long-term manager -- a method that is changing the world.
Synopsis
Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, the bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management theorists shows how companies of any size in any industry can seize opportunities in the post-bubble economy. Lean Thinking begins by helping listeners to identify value, asking, "What does the customer really want?" instead of "What can we try to convince the customer to accept?" Lean thinkers then identify the value stream -- every step required to move a specific good or service from initial concept into the hands of the customer -- for each product and ask if each step really creates value. Those that don't -- the great majority -- are then removed, and the remaining steps are conducted in continuous flow at the pull of the customer, as the firm manages toward perfection. As a consequence, lead times, costs of all sorts, and defects shrink, while responsiveness to customer needs and selling prices increase.
In an economic downturn, many companies are searching desperately for a sustainable formula for renewed growth and success. Lean Thinking is that formula -- a proven blueprint and specific action plan that will help any company stabilize its position and grow steadily while better serving its customers, employees, suppliers, and investors.
Synopsis
Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, the bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management theorists shows how companies of any size in any industry can seize opportunities in the post-bubble economy. Lean Thinking begins by helping listeners to identify value, asking, "What does the customer really want?" instead of "What can we try to convince the customer to accept?" Lean thinkers then identify the value stream -- every step required to move a specific good or service from initial concept into the hands of the customer -- for each product and ask if each step really creates value. Those that don't -- the great majority -- are then removed, and the remaining steps are conducted in continuous flow at the pull of the customer, as the firm manages toward perfection. As a consequence, lead times, costs of all sorts, and defects shrink, while responsiveness to customer needs and selling prices increase.
In an economic downturn, many companies are searching desperately for a sustainable formula for renewed growth and success. Lean Thinking is that formula -- a proven blueprint and specific action plan that will help any company stabilize its position and grow steadily while better serving its customers, employees, suppliers, and investors.
About the Author
Jim Womack and
Dan Jones are co-authors of
The Machine That Changed the World, The Future of the Automobile and
Seeing the Whole. Jim is Founder and President of the Lean Enterprise Institute (
www.lean.org), a non-profit education and research organization based in Brookline, MA, dedicated to spread of lean thinking.
Dan Jones is Founder and President of Lean Enterprise Academy UK (www.leanuk.org).