Dan Jones
Dan Jones is Founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K., a senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, management thought leader, and mentor on applying lean process thinking to every type of business. He is the author with James P. Womack of the influential and popular management books that describe the principles and practice of lean thinking in production, The Machine That Changed the World, Lean Thinking, and Lean Solutions.

Jones is an advisor to organizations making lean transformations, including Unipart, where he helped establish the first company university in the U.K., Tesco, and Portsmouth Hospital. Jones was the European Director of MIT's Future of the Automobile and International Motor Vehicle Programs. He is advisor to the European Efficient Consumer Response movement and editor of the International Commerce Review. Jones holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Sussex.

Jim Womack
Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder of and senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., a nonprofit training, publishing, conference, and management research company chartered in August 1997 to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based initially on Toyota’s business system and now being extended to an entire lean management system.

Womack is also the co-author of The Machine That Changed the World, Lean Thinking, and Lean Solutions, with Dan Jones. He 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. As research director of MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program, Womack led the research team that coined the term “lean production” to describe the Toyota Production System.

Womack served as the Institute's chairman and CEO from 1997 until 2010 when he was succeeded by John Shook.

David Brunt
David Brunt has been both applying and researching lean since 1990. His career started in the automotive industry at Rolls-Ryoce Motor Cars. In 1993 his interest in lean thinking led to studying for an MBA in Supply Chain Management at Cardiff Business School under the guidance of Dan Jones.

Brunt has been working with Dan Jones since 1997. At the Lean Enterprise Research Centre he was involved in pioneering action research projects at the individual firm level and across whole supply chains. His work on helping car dealers learn lean was told in Jim Womack and Dan Jones' book Lean Solutions and in his own Shingo Award winning book Creating Lean Dealers, which he co-authored with John Kiff.

Since 2003 Brunt has been Senior Fellow at the Lean Enterprise Academy. He helps firms design, develop, and implement their lean journey and acts as a mentor and coach to managers making the lean leap.

Matthew Lovejoy
The son of a Chicago tool shop owner, Matthew Lovejoy learned early about the challenges of owning a business. As an entrepreneur, he founded and grew two successful companies before selling them. He took over as president of Lovejoy Industries, Inc., from his father in 1997 and bought the business in 1999. Today Lovejoy Industries is a holding company that includes Acme Alliance, a strategic partnership of 16 companies in North and South Amerca, Europe, and China.

Lovejoy's lean journey began in 2002, when he launched the continuing transformation of Acme Die Casting. The next year he moved his desk to the floor and personally spearheaded the lean conversion. He has led hundreds of kaizen activities in the U.S., China, and Brazil to drive continuous-improvement thinking to the shop floor. Lovejoy holds a bachelor's degree in business from Drake University.

• So what are you going to do about it?
  John Shook's e-letter on the need for lean thinkers to move from improving individual value streams to working collaboratively to improve entire shared value streams.
• Move Your Operations to China? Do some lean math first.
  Jim Womack's e-letter on the true costs of off-shoring and the factors you need to consider.
• Manage the Contract or Improve the Value Stream?
  Jim Womack's e-letter on walking a multi-organization value-stream and the need for purchasing departments to work with suppliers to improve their shared value stream.
• Industry Week article about Parker Hannifin's experience with extended value-stream mapping.
• Jim Womack's presentation at the 15th Annual Singo Prize Conference on the extended value stream.
• LEI's new tool for seeing the big picture
  Jim Womack's e-letter about the original edition of Seeing the Whole.

Webinar

• Learning to See the Whole Value Stream
  Featuring Jim Womack and Dan Jones
  View the Webinar
  Download the Slides

• Table of Contents
• Foreword by John Shook
• Introduction
• Essay:"Saving an Extended Enterprise: A CEO's perspective"
  Matthew Lovejoy, president of Acme Alliance, has contributed a new essay for this edition on his experience as a second-tier supplier in convincing much larger partners to embrace collaborative thinking about their shared value stream. He shows how small organizations that work with giant customers and suppliers can use the power of value-stream thinking to move all of the firms along the stream in a new direction. He also shows how value stream should think about the true system costs of production locations around the globe.

Maps

• Maps from the wiper value stream example within the book
  • Current, Future 1, Future 2, and Ideal States
  • Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Current and Future States
• Maps from "Extending Value-Stream Analysis from the Factory to the Customer — The Auto Wiper Case" essay
• Maps from "Applying Value-Stream Analysis to Retailing — The Tesco Case" essay
• Maps from "Saving an Extended Enterprise" essay
• Maps from "Seeing a Whole Supply System Across the Globe" essay

Excerpts

• Table of Contents
• Foreword by John Shook
• Introduction
• Essay:"Saving an Extended Enterprise: A CEO's perspective"
  Matthew Lovejoy, president of Acme Alliance, has contributed a new essay for this edition on his experience as a second-tier supplier in convincing much larger partners to embrace collaborative thinking about their shared value stream. He shows how small organizations that work with giant customers and suppliers can use the power of value-stream thinking to move all of the firms along the stream in a new direction. He also shows how value stream should think about the true system costs of production locations around the globe.

Maps

• Maps from the wiper value stream example within the book
  • Current, Future 1, Future 2, and Ideal States
  • Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Current and Future States
• Maps from "Extending Value-Stream Analysis from the Factory to the Customer — The Auto Wiper Case" essay
• Maps from "Applying Value-Stream Analysis to Retailing — The Tesco Case" essay
• Maps from "Saving an Extended Enterprise" essay
• Maps from "Seeing a Whole Supply System Across the Globe" essay

Videos

Video of Matthew Lovejoy's presentation on the Acme Alliance story