Lean thinking

Lean thinking is a business methodology that aims to provide a new way to think about how to organize human activities to deliver more benefits to society and value to individuals while eliminating waste. The term lean thinking was coined by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones to capture the essence of their in-depth study of Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System. Lean thinking is a new way of thinking any activity and seeing the waste inadvertently generated by the way the process is organized by focusing on the concepts of:

The aim of lean thinking is to create a lean enterprise, one that sustains growth by aligning customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction, and that offers innovative products or services profitably while minimizing unnecessary over-costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to identify wasted time and effort in their own job and to better work together to improve processes by eliminating such waste, the resulting enterprise will deliver more value at less expense while developing every employee’s confidence, competence and ability to work with others.

The idea of lean thinking gained popularity in the business world and has evolved in two different directions:

Lean thinking was born out of studying the rise of Toyota Motor Company from a bankrupt Japanese automaker in the early 1950s to today’s dominant global player. At every stage of its expansion, Toyota remained a puzzle by capturing new markets with products deemed relatively unattractive and with systematically lower costs while not following any of the usual management dictates. In studying the company firsthand it appeared that it had a unique group of elders (sensei) and coordinators (trainers from Japan) dedicated to help managers think differently. Contrarily to every other large company, Toyota’s training in its formative years was focused on developing people’s reasoning abilities rather than pushing them to execute specialist-derived systems.

These “sensei”, or masters in lean thinking would challenge line managers to look differently at their own jobs by focusing on:

Experience shows that adopting lean thinking requires abandoning deeply engrained mainstream management thought routines, and this is never easy. The three main ways to adopt lean thinking are, unsurprisingly:

In the lean thinking tradition, the teacher should not explain but demonstrate – learning is the full responsibility of the learner. However, to create the proper conditions for learning the lean tradition has adopted a number of practices from Toyota’s own learning curve. The aim of these practices is not to improve processes per se but to create an environment for teachable and learnable moments.

There are two controversies surrounding the word “lean,” one concerning the image of lean with the general public and the other within the lean movement itself.

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Wikipedia