Forward to Fundamentals
featuring:
John Shook and Jim Womack

Originally presented April 23, 2009 at 2:00 PM EDT

In recent years, most discussions around lean transformation have understandably evolved toward more managerial and strategic matters. Yet there remains an alarming lack of solid implementation of the fundamentals! In this current economic crisis we can actually move our lean journeys forward faster by looking back to the lessons that led to the creation of TPS in the weakened Japanese economy following World War II. This webinar is designed to uncover the deep roots of the original lean thinking and tools and how you can better focus your own lean implementation plans and execution.

This webinar features Jim Womack, Chairman and Founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute and co-author of The Machine that Changed the World, Lean Thinking, and Lean Solutions, and John Shook, co-author of Learning to See and Kaizen Express and author of Managing to Learn. Jim and John will explore many of the misunderstood and forgotten elements of the original TPS model and foundational practices that comprise a lean operating system.

By attending this webinar you will learn:

• How lean principles arose and developed at Toyota
• The importance of “making do with less” in the development of the TPS philosophy
• The central role of Purpose, Process, and People
• The three most important back-to-basic-principles of lean
• The critical, but different role of problem solving at the front line, middle management and executive levels
• The importance of focusing on the technical and social elements in any lean transformation

John Shook, Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute

John Shook is an industrial anthropologist who began his observations and analysis of companies, their operations, and their organization during his first tour of companies in Japan in 1977. This led to John learning about lean while working for 11 years with Toyota in Japan and the United States, helping that company transfer production, engineering, and management systems from Japan to its overseas affiliates and suppliers. During his seven-year stay at Toyota's headquarters, he became the company's first American "kacho" (manager) in Japan. In the United States, John became a part of Toyota’s North American engineering and R&D center in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1991, as general manager of administration and strategic planning. His last position with Toyota was as senior American manager with the Toyota Supplier Support Center in Lexington, Kentucky, the company’s organization to assist the efforts of North American companies to implement TPS.

This real-world experience in implementing lean principles throughout an organization gives him extraordinary insight into the challenges faced by those who are interested in lean enterprises. As co-author of Learning to See, John helped introduce value-stream mapping as a tool for lean practitioners; with Managing to Learn, he similarly is taking lean practitioners into new territory, that of working with and leading with A3s.

John now spends his time researching and developing lean principles with Jim Womack, Dan Jones, and José Ferro as a senior advisor in the Lean Enterprise Institute. He is the former director of the University of Michigan, Japan Technological Management Program, and currently heads two consulting groups—the Lean Transformations Group, LLC and the TWI Network, Inc. John is recognized as a true sensei who enthusiastically shares his knowledge and insights within the lean community and with those who would not have made the leap.

James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute

Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit education, publishing, conference, and research organization chartered in August, 1997, to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based on Toyota's business system.

The intellectual basis for the Cambridge, MA-based Institute is described in a series of books and articles co-authored by Dr. Womack and Daniel Jones over the past 20 years. The most widely known books are: The Machine That Changed the World (Macmillan/Rawson Associates, 1990), Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Seeing The Whole: mapping the extended value stream (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2001), Lean Solutions (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Articles include: "From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise" (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1994), "Beyond Toyota: How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection" (Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996), and “Lean Consumption” (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 2005).

The Institute conducts research activities in a wide range of industries to create a tool kit of methods for implementing lean thinking and the necessary leadership behaviors. The Institute also sponsors educational meetings, workshops, senior management seminars, and conferences through the year and helps people to apply lean thinking in manufacturing and entirely new applications such as healthcare, retail, air travel, and distribution.

Dr. Womack received a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970, a master's degree in transportation systems from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1982 (for a dissertation on comparative industrial policy in the U.S., Germany, and Japan). During the period 1975-1991, Dr. Womack was a full-time research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices. As research director of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program, Dr. Womack led the research team that coined the term "lean production."