Jim Womack's eLetters & Columns

Jim Womack’s efforts to spread Lean Thinking throughout the world led him to found the Lean Enterprise Institute. While he was the CEO and Chairman of LEI (Jim is currently the Senior Advisor of LEI), he wrote a very popular series of eletters about lean. These are those letters, please feel free to share them with your colleagues. Jim Womack's efforts to spread Lean Thinking throughout the world led him to found the Lean Enterprise Institute.

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• Getting Over Gemba-phobia
  July 22, 2011

  “I work in a company where leaders think gemba walks are scheduled visits to the factory to look at performance visibility boards (forgetting to turn around and look at the work.) How do we try and correct this false thinking?”Jim responds with shared observations and suggestions for helping leaders learn how to walk the gemba.  read more »

• Gemba Walk Checklist
  July 13, 2011

  An attendee from Jim's Gemba Walks webinar asks: “Do you find it easier to complete your Gemba Walk if you have a pre-defined form to take with you on the walk?”Jim responds: "This is an issue of your objective and your experience." He goes on to discuss how the purpose of the walk might affect the response to this inquiry. read more »

• Who's Responsible
  July 6, 2011

  In reviewing my calendar, I find that I have taken eight gemba walks in the last five weeks. These ranged from manufacturing value streams in China, New York state, and Florida, to a healthcare value stream in Massachusetts, to regulatory value streams in Washington, DC, and Florida. At some point… read more »

• Passing the Baton
  September 28, 2010

  Jim: Thirteen years ago, when I opened the doors at the Lean Enterprise Institute, I thought there was an important need for a nonprofit organization to provide practical advice as well as thought leadership for managers trying to apply lean thinking around the world. My idea was to package the… read more »

• The Joy of a Greenfield
  August 24, 2010

  (See this letter's closing for Jim's announcement about stepping down as CEO or read the news release here. -Editor)Last spring on a trip to Central America, I encountered that wonderful sight for process improvers, a “greenfield”. And I literally mean a green field. It was behind a… read more »

• Homicide by Example?
  July 13, 2010

  My LEI colleague Dave LaHote is fond of saying that managers - and especially senior managers - overestimate their effectiveness, particularly as they seek to improve their organizations through formal initiatives. And they underestimate the impact (often negative) of their daily personal actions… read more »

• The Tipping Point?
  June 10, 2010

  I’ve been interested in applying lean thinking to healthcare since I first focused a lean lens on the delivery process 15 years ago. How, I wondered, could lean manufacturers treat products in factories better than healthcare providers treated patients?I was hopeful about initial attempts to… read more »

• Becoming Horizontal in a Vertical World
  May 18, 2010

  One of my favorite value-stream walks is with the senior managers of several organizations who share and jointly manage a value-creating process that stretches all the way from raw materials to the end customer. I've been taking walks of this sort for more than 20 years and I usually see the same… read more »

• The End of the Beginning
  April 1, 2010

  NUMMI closes today. The GM-Toyota joint venture assembling motor vehicles in California lasted 25 years - a very long time for a joint venture - and about 8 million vehicles rolled off the line. For those working at NUMMI this is a truly sad day and I hope our Lean Community will reach out to help… read more »

• Lean for the Long Term
  March 4, 2010

  I've now been thinking about lean continuously for thirty years, since the fall of 1979 when my MIT bosses asked me to explore how a few Japanese companies had developed a striking advantage in designing and making motor vehicles. Recently, I've found myself reflecting on where we in the Lean… read more »

• Back to Work
  February 16, 2010

  Only a month ago I wrote about going beyond Toyota. And in light of the last month's events, I suppose that must seem prescient. But actually it wasn't because I wasn’t writing about Toyota. I was writing about the path ahead for our Lean Community.I want to continue that thought process this… read more »

• Beyond Toyota
  January 7, 2010

  Fifteen years ago, when Dan Jones and I wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review to launch Lean Thinking, the editors insisted on the title “Beyond Toyota”. I found this exasperating because it implied we were somehow going beyond Toyota’s discoveries about the best… read more »

• On Our Watch
  December 3, 2009

  A few weeks ago I walked through the Arsenale in Venice, which has been in continuous use for building and overhauling military ships since 1104. The Arsenale is still an Italian naval base and visiting requires permission from navy headquarters in Rome. But my interest was not in present-day… read more »

• Making Everyone Whole
  November 5, 2009

  I've had a big smile on my face for much of the last month because I've had the opportunity to visit progressive organizations on three continents to look at their efforts to create lean value streams. Walking through any process, good or bad, seems to put a smile on my face for one of two reasons.… read more »

• In Search of Value Stream Architects
  September 3, 2009

  Recently I've been spending most of my gemba time walking through value-creating processes in organizations far away from manufacturing. And the further away I get -- for example, all the way to healthcare -- the more I find myself asking, "Who designed this wasteful, incapable, unavailable,… read more »

• The Mind of the Lean Manager
  July 30, 2009

  Several years ago I started to talk about the need to move beyond lean tools - including the very powerful concept of Value-Stream Mapping - to lean management. At the same time we at LEI began to publish a set of volumes on lean management techniques. These consist of strategy deployment to set… read more »

• Sailing a Straight Course in a Time of Variances
  June 30, 2009

  Recently I spent a day as a lean anthropologist, sitting in the back of the room and observing the behavior of senior managers during the monthly leadership team meeting of a large corporation. I hadn't done this in some years and it caused me to reflect again on how organizations do strange… read more »

• The End of an Era
  June 2, 2009

  When General Motors filed for bankruptcy yesterday it marked the end of an era. The first truly modern, manage-by-the-numbers corporation, created by Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, was laid to rest as a viable concept. But what comes next?This is not just a question for GM or large enterprises more… read more »

• Re-purpose Before You Re-structure
  April 9, 2009

  One of my favorite questions when meeting with senior leaders of enterprises is, "What is your organization's purpose?" The typical and immediate response is, "To make money and grow." "But," I respond, "this answer has nothing to do with your customers, who… read more »

• Respect Science, Particularly in a Crisis
  March 5, 2009

  The current recession is the fifth in my working career.  And it is beginning to feel like the worst. I can't imagine that any manager or  improvement team member in any industry in any country isn't feeling a bit  queasy at this point, as the world economy keeps recessing toward an… read more »

• Constancy of Purpose
  February 11, 2009

  The first of Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points is "create constancy of purpose for continual improvement of products and service to society." When I first read this many years ago it seemed so simple and obvious. How could anyone not have constancy of purpose?Now that I'm older and… read more »

• Learning to Manage
  January 22, 2009

  My colleague John Shook has recently written a wonderful book for LEI about "managing to learn". By this he means the method of discovery that lean managers use to deploy initiatives from higher organizational levels, solve problems at their organizational level, and evaluate proposals… read more »

• 2008 in Summary: A Large Enough Wave Swamps All Boats
  December 31, 2008

  We all know the phrase, "a rising tide lifts all boats", and this was true during the world economic bubble of the last few years. Almost any firm could survive, even with mediocre performance and no improvement.Unfortunately, there is a corollary. A really big tide - a financial tsunami… read more »

• Mega Mura Bubble Trouble
  November 13, 2008

  I started writing my monthly e-letter in October of 2001 to speak to the worries of the Lean Community as the world economy slid into recession. So this month marks the end of one complete cycle -- seven years of bust, boom, and bust -- as the world enters a new recession.When Dan Jones and I wrote… read more »

• It Takes 2 (or more) to A3
  October 7, 2008

  We've just launched John Shook's new book, Managing to Learn, and I'm tremendously excited. I think it is the most important work we have published at LEI. This is because John clearly explains why A3 thinking is the core of the Toyota management system and shows how the repeated act of creating… read more »

• Manage the Contract or Improve the Value Stream?
  September 16, 2008

  As much as I would like to, I can't walk frequently along every type of value stream. As a result, it has been a while since I've walked along the complex value streams shared by customer firms and their suppliers. So when several firms recently offered a chance to take multi-organization walks --… read more »

• The Worst Form of Muda
  August 14, 2008

  I've just returned from India where I attended the first Lean Summits, in Mumbai and Chennai, organized by the Lean Management Institute of India (www.leaninstitute.in). One of the souvenirs I collect on my visits to different countries is special reasons why lean is impossible in each country. And… read more »

• From Staffs Conducting Programs to Line Managers Solving Problems
  July 17, 2008

  As part of a new LEI research project on lean management, I have been visiting with a number organizations well along in lean transformations. I ask the leaders of these initiatives about their methods, their experiences to date, and their trajectories. Then I take a walk along one or more of their… read more »

• Nice Car, Long Journey
  June 6, 2008

  2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the introduction of the Model T Ford. This truly is “the machine that changed the world”, even if the title of a 1990 book might suggest otherwise! Nearly 16 million copies were built over 19 years of production as the world was motorized.The Model T… read more »

• Creating Value or Shifting Wealth?
  May 1, 2008

  How do we judge the progress of the Lean Movement? One critical indicator is our success in extending lean thinking to new industries and activities. In recent years I have been greatly encouraged that lean thinking is moving far beyond its origins in manufacturing to distribution, retailing,… read more »

• The Big Mura and Mean Leanness
  April 3, 2008

  Every day humans eat very nearly the same number of meals and sleep in the same number of houses and travel the same number of miles to work. All of these numbers increase slowly with population growth, but the number of us on the planet and our needs don't change rapidly. So how can we have… read more »

• Yokoten Across the World
  March 6, 2008

  Recently in the same city I visited two facilities of a company trying to embrace lean thinking. At the first I found high levels of technical knowledge, a clear transformation plan involving a change in management behavior, and a high level of energy. At the second I found some technical knowledge… read more »

• The Missing Link
  February 7, 2008

  I have a great stove, not that I cook that much. It's shiny, sophisticated, and full of capabilities, most of which I never use. I've been very happy with this brilliant object and its manufacturer for more than five years until the last few weeks when it needed its first repair.I called the… read more »

• Cadence
  January 3, 2008

  Think of cadence as takt time adapted to activities beyond routine production. In the product development world -- as brilliantly illuminated by our late colleague, Allen Ward -- it is very helpful for a development organization to have a clear sense how many new products are needed per unit of calendar time and to develop a steady pace for initiating and finishing these projects. The demand might be one per year or one per quarter or one per month, depending on the perceived desires of customers. But in every case the demand needs to be determined in advance and projects need to be completed at a steady rate. read more »

• Respect for People
  December 20, 2007

  For years I've visited companies where "respect for people" is a core element of the corporate philosophy. So I've asked managers in many companies a simple question. "How do you show respect?" I have usually heard that employees should be treated fairly, given clear goals,… read more »

• Ten Years and Counting
  October 23, 2007

  The Lean Enterprise Institute just celebrated its 10th anniversary with a small, private conference near our headquarters in Cambridge, MA. Surviving for a decade is no small accomplishment for a start-up organization and I take pride in our achievements:14 published titles with half a million… read more »

• Kaizen or Rework?
  August 22, 2007

  I recently visited a contract electronics manufacturer with a striking capacity for kaizen – the steady improvement of every step along its key value streams. Dozens of kaizen events were being performed across the company to eliminate wasted steps and to remedy quality, availability,… read more »

• The Problem of Sustainability
  May 30, 2007

  I recently got a call from an old friend who led one of the first lean implementation efforts in healthcare in the mid-1990s. He has moved on to other challenges and we hadn't had a chance to catch up in recent years. So I asked him what happened to the lean initiative in the healthcare… read more »

• Creating Lean Healthcare
  May 3, 2007

  Ten years ago this month I made a visit to the Mayo Clinic’s large medical complex in Rochester, Minnesota. I was not there as a patient. Instead I was a sort of lean anthropologist. I was making my first foray into a major medical organization to examine its thought process and behavior from… read more »

• Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose
  April 4, 2007

  Simon & Schuster has just re-issued The Machine That Changed the World, which Dan Jones, Dan Roos, and I co-authored 17 years ago. Doubtless, our publisher has noticed the current Toyota boom when any book with "Toyota" on the cover sells.Fortunately, Machine is still the best… read more »

• More Thinking About Lean Transformation
  January 16, 2007

  Recently we at the Lean Enterprise Institute have started a new research project trying to answer a simple question: “What is the best way to conduct a lean transformation?”This is not a new question, of course. A decade ago Dan Jones and I proposed an “Action Plan” in our… read more »

• What I've Learned About Planning and Execution
  December 14, 2006

  By the time I founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in mid-1997, I had been thinking for years about how organizations prioritize and plan. And I had carefully read the policy deployment (hoshin kanri) literature emerging from Japan since the 1970s. So I thought it would be easy to develop and… read more »

• From Lean Tools to Lean Management
  November 21, 2006

  I’ve been thinking about the challenge of lean transformation for 27 years now, since I started studying Toyota as part of the MIT global automotive project in 1979. That’s a long time and during this period I’ve watched lean thinking progress through a series of stages.In the… read more »

• Gross Domestic Product Verses Gross Domestic Waste
  October 23, 2006

  I’ve always been fascinated by how humans count, especially the way we always seem to count the wrong things. Recently I was looking at the American counting of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The U.S. government reports that GDP was up 2.6% in the second quarter of 2006, after rising 5.8% in… read more »

• The Lean Way Forward at Ford
  September 15, 2006

  I’ve been reflecting on today’s remarkable headlines about the latest retreat by the Ford Motor Company as part of its “Way Forward” campaign. While reflecting, I have found it useful to think about the history of lean thinking at Ford, going back nearly 100 years. I believe… read more »

• Thinking End to End
  August 11, 2006

  Every value stream runs from raw materials all the way to the end customer. And value for the customer is only delivered at the very end. In many service industries, of course, the “raw material” is information rather than molecules -- like the data in the claim application… read more »

• Mura, Muri, Muda?
  July 6, 2006

  Twenty years ago this month, when my first daughter was born, the young men I supervised in MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program went dashing out of the office to buy her a gift. They returned shortly with a pink T-shirt, size 1, with the stenciled message on the front “Muda, Mura,… read more »

• Purpose, Process, People
  June 12, 2006

  Recently I have heard from several members of the Lean Community wanting to know how to evaluate the lean efforts of their company. “How do we know how lean we are?” “What metrics should we use to measure our progress?” “Are we ‘world-class’ in terms of… read more »

• Fewer Heroes, More Farmers
  May 12, 2006

  I recently met with the chief executive of a very large American corporation organized by business units, each self-contained with its own product development, production, purchasing and sales functions. I asked what a CEO does in this situation and got a simple answer: “I search for heroic… read more »

• Lean Leadership
  April 4, 2006

  When I founded the Lean Enterprise Institute nine years ago this summer I wanted to make the core lean knowledge available in easy to understand forms. My hope was that everyone could make faster progress toward creating organizations that create more value with less waste.Looking back, I think we… read more »

• A Tale of Two Business Systems
  February 7, 2006

  In the fall of 1990, Dan Jones, Dan Roos, and I co-authored The Machine That Changed the World, our description of lean enterprise. On page 253 we forecast that 1991 or 1992 would be the moment of crisis as the full power of lean (represented byToyota) threatened to topple mass production (defended… read more »

• Just in Time, Just in Case, and Just Plain Wrong
  January 22, 2006

  I started my e-letters immediately after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, as a response to the many commentators asserting that JIT could no longer work due to the risk of disruption in supply chains. They argued that large inventories were needed everywhere along value streams to permit… read more »

• The Big Opportunity
  November 7, 2005

  I started studying manufacturing performance  26 years ago this fall. We set out at MIT to perform the most exhaustive and accurate benchmarking of the world’s largest manufacturing industry – motor vehicles – because we believed this was the best proxy for manufacturing… read more »

• Necessary But Not Sufficient
  October 17, 2005

  One of the hardest things in my line of work is seeing a company make enormous strides in getting lean and yet fail to prosper. Today’s heartbreak is Delphi, the giant American auto-parts company that was one of the founding sponsors of LEI and which has been a test bed for our ideas and… read more »

• Lean Publishing and Lean Solutions
  September 8, 2005

  Normally I walk through other people’s industries. But today let me take a brief walk through my own: publishing. You don’t have to walk far to discover some amazing things:It takes traditional publishers up to three months to “stuff the channel” with a new book, through… read more »

• Lean Consumption, Lean Provision, and Lean Solutions
  August 16, 2005

  Here’s some good news for the Lean Community. We really are making the world’s factories better. I was recently in Spain where I toured a facility belonging to an American company whose U.S. operations I first visited in 1992. They were terrible at that time. In fact, it was classic… read more »

• The Truth Lies in the Lies of Fiction
  May 31, 2005

  Twenty years ago, while flying to a final vacation before the onset of children, I found myself reading Eli Goldratt's The Goal . It was a great story, even if a little short on practical advice. (You were supposed to look for your “Herbies” - your production bottlenecks -- but the… read more »

• The Problem with Creative Work and Creative Management
  May 10, 2005

  Years ago I heard a presentation from someone at Toyota explaining where to begin in implementing the Toyota Production System. “Start by analyzing the work to be done.” This meant listing all the actions required to create the value in a given product and then dividing these… read more »

• The Dramatic Spread of Lean Thinking
  April 11, 2005

  Without question, lean thinking was born in the factory. That's simply because processes are easiest to see when materials are being transformed into physical products. (Remember that a process is simply a set of actions that must be performed correctly in the right sequence at the proper time in… read more »

• Lean Consumption
  March 7, 2005

             As I suspect you know, I see every value-creating organization as a big collection of processes:   A product development process involving many steps that must be performed properly in the proper sequence at the proper time… read more »

• Lean Leadership
  February 3, 2005

  On my gemba walks I often get comments and questions about leadership.  “We can’t seem to get anywhere because we don’t have any leadership.”  “Who should lead the lean transformation?”  “Is a ‘lean’ leader different from any… read more »

• The State of Lean 2005
  January 11, 2005

  As we enter the New Year, I find my attention turning from the history of lean (as described last month) to the future of lean. What do I see?On one level, it is hard to imagine how things could be going better:Toyota, our exemplar company, continues to march from victory to victory in global… read more »

• A Lean Walk Through History
  December 7, 2004

  As you probably know, I like to walk through the gemba, along the value stream, to see for myself how value is being created and how waste can be eliminated. However, recently I took a wonderful but dismaying walk through a facility that no longer creates value. The experience set me thinking about… read more »

• Lean Information Management
  November 5, 2004

  As you probably know, I try to walk through as many processes as I can because I learn something new on every walk.  Recently I was walking through a manufacturing operation and found myself wondering about the principles of lean information management, in particular with regard to production… read more »

• Deconstructing the Tower of Babel
  October 7, 2004

  Seventeen years ago, in my office at MIT, I witnessed a magic moment when a new term was born.  We were getting ready to publish the first article on the findings of the International Motor Vehicle Program and we needed a label to describe the phenomenon we were observing in our study of… read more »

• Competition Equals Lean?
  September 1, 2004

  I was recently reading an article by Professor Michael Porter (co-authored with Professor Elizabeth Teisberg) in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review about the problem of the ever-rising costs of healthcare in combination with stagnant (and unacceptable) quality.  Being an economist,… read more »

• Bad People or a Bad Process?
  July 28, 2004

  Recently, while traveling to attend the Lean Service Summit in Amsterdam, I encountered an amazing scene at London’s Heathrow Airport.  While checking in for my flight on a Monday morning, I found myself in a nightmare line stretching around the corner from the check-in counter and far… read more »

• Creating Basic Stability
  May 25, 2004

  On my recent walks through companies, I've had an important realization. I had been assuming that in most companies the process steps in a typical value stream are sufficiently stable that it's practical to introduce flow, pull, and leveled production right away. By "stable" I mean that… read more »

• Standardized Worrying
  April 26, 2004

            Years ago when Dan Jones and I first visited Toyota in Japan, we were struck by something that seemed out of keeping with their continuing success.  They seemed to worry all the time.  We met managers who had just accomplished… read more »

• The Wonder of Level Pull
  March 31, 2004

  Many years ago in Toyota City I first witnessed the twin concepts of level production and the smooth pull of needed items throughout a complex production operation. My education occurred at a supplier of components to Toyota assembly plants that had created a small and precisely determined inventory of finished components near the shipping dock. Read more. read more »

• Lean Beyond the Factory
  March 23, 2004

  I've been thinking a lot recently about just what a business really is.  As a lean process thinker, my best answer is that a business is a collection of value creating processes. Indeed, it's the sum of its processes.Some of these are primary processes that directly create value for the… read more »

• Adding Cost or Creating Value?
  March 4, 2004

  I was out on tour this past week, listening to companies' stories as they try to achieve a "lean" transformation.  And I was struck, as I often am, by confusing terminology. The companies I visited thought they were "adding value" but I mostly watched them adding… read more »

• Why We Are a Nonprofit (And How You Can Benefit)
  February 3, 2004

  Every month I get calls and emails from folks thinking the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) is a consulting business and wanting to hire a sensei. And I get other calls and emails asking if we have a certification program for lean practitioners. (Lean Belts?) And I get still more calls and emails from Lean Thinkers searching for jobs and from firms seeking to employ lean experts, with both thinking we are some sort of executive search firm. read more »

• The Prospects for Lean
  January 7, 2004

  As we all return to work in the New Year, I wanted to provide a few thoughts on the prospects for lean thinking in the years ahead.Let’s begin with some good news:  Process thinking is going to be a growth industry as global manufacturing grows.  Many of you may have been startled… read more »

• Is Lean Mean?
  December 2, 2003

  Is Lean Mean?Recently I had lunch with an old colleague from MIT I hadn’t seen in a while. His first question was, “What new ideas are you working on? Surely you’re way beyond ‘lean’ by now.” That question was just what I expected from a professor, whose life is… read more »

• Is Lean Green?
  November 4, 2003

  People often tell me that lean thinking must be “green” because it reduces the amount of energy, manufacturing space, and wasted by-products required to produce a given product. Indeed, examples are often cited of reducing human effort, space, and scrap by 50 percent or more, per… read more »

• The Power of a Precise Process
  October 1, 2003

  When I first started to study the Toyota Production System many years ago, I was struck by something very simple:  Its utter precision.  There was a place for every tool and part, and standard work for every task.  There was a standard amount of inventory (minimum and maximum) at… read more »

• Dueling Sensei and the Need for a Standard Operating System
  September 11, 2003

  Recently I witnessed a sight I’ve seen too many times before.  I was visiting a company when a new sensei (Japanese for “teacher”) arrived to advise on the firm’s lean conversion.  The first thing the sensei said to the vice president for operations was, “My… read more »

• Beach Reading
  August 12, 2003

  The second edition of Lean Thinking has been out two months now and at least a few members of the Lean Community seem to have used it for beach reading. I’m grateful, but they’ve also e-mailed me with an interesting question: “Whatever happened to the bicycle company you talk… read more »

• Jim Womack on how lean compares with Six Sigma, Re-engineering, TOC, TPM, etc., etc.
  July 14, 2003

   It amazes me, but I still get lots of questions about how “lean” compares with Six Sigma, Total Productive Maintenance, Business Process Re-engineering, Demand-Flow, the Theory of Constraints, and other approaches to improvement.  And I always give the same answer: At the end… read more »

• We Have Been (Lean) Thinking
  May 21, 2003

  It’s been six years since we launched Lean Thinking and we’ve had a lot of gratifying experience in these years watching members of the Lean Community resolutely applying the five lean principles of value, value stream, flow, pull and perfection. During this same time, we’ve also… read more »

• Lean Thinking for Air Travel
  May 5, 2003

  Recently I got a call from an aide to Don Carty at American Airlines (their Chairman who resigned this past week.) This person wanted to apply lean thinking to air travel and asked what I thought about their “lean” idea.It turned out that American was making plans – now announced… read more »

• Here’s to Toyota
  April 15, 2003

  More than twenty years ago Dan Jones and I made an important discovery. On a trip to Japan we concluded that there was really no “Japan, Inc.” or standardized way of doing business. Instead there were many companies pursuing a variety of approaches, some very good and some mediocre.… read more »

• Taking a Value Stream Walk at Firm A
  March 12, 2003

  I was out walking through a company this past week, something I often do. The firm I visited had asked what I thought of their lean efforts to date and I paid a visit to find out. While flying home, it occurred to me that you might find my method and checklist of some use in your own improvement… read more »

• LEI looks for success stories to share
  February 26, 2003

  I routinely end my talks by offering to give anyone 15 minutes of fame in my and Dan Jones’s next book if they will do something new and notable in lean practice.  This is a sincere offer and we were able to make good on it with our case studies of Lantech, Wiremold, Pratt & Whitney,… read more »

• Move Your Operations to China? Do some lean math first.
  January 10, 2003

   I recently got a phone call from a reporter for The Wall Street Journal with a simple but provocative question: "If you are a manufacturer in a high-wage country such as the U.S., can you ever be lean enough that you don't need to relocate your operations to China?" The… read more »

• Year-end Message About the State of the Lean Community
  December 20, 2002

  As we come to the end of 2002, I wanted to reflect briefly on the state of our Lean Community and to thank you for your continued support. As I've noted before with some sadness, economic distress is good for lean thinking. Taiichi Ohno said long ago that most companies are only willing to tackle… read more »

• Substituting Money for Value Stream Management
  November 13, 2002

  I've been traveling again since I last wrote, this time to visit a household-name American company trying to pursue perfection in its total business after starting with an all-out Six Sigma initiative. What I found is a pretty common pattern. Technical experts are conducting hundreds of Six Sigma… read more »

• The “Right Sequence” for Implementing Lean
  October 11, 2002

  One of the best things about leading the Lean Enterprise Institute is that I travel widely to learn how things are going across the Lean Community. Recently I've looked at two truly interesting operations, one in New Hampshire, USA, and the other outside of Chennai, India. Together they provide an… read more »

• What do you need from LEI?
  August 1, 2002

  August 1 marks the fifth anniversary of the Lean Enterprise Institute. In our first five years we've conducted Lean Summits across the world (most recently in India in May) and produced a series of workbooks and workshops that many of you have bought and attended. Let me take this occasion to… read more »

• A Great Time for Lean Thinking
  June 25, 2002

  I’ve just been reading the financial news and realizing that this is a great time to be a lean thinker. In fact, it’s the best environment for lean thinking that I’ve seen in more than a decade. Here’s why: In the 1990s most senior managers in North America, Europe and Japan… read more »

• LEI Expands Global Network
  June 3, 2002

  When I founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in Boston in 1997, I wanted to create a global network of non-profit institutes working horizontally to advance the ideas of lean thinking by conducting Lean Summits, presenting workshops, and offering translations of lean workbooks in their country or… read more »

• LEI's indicator that can't lie: Doing the math
  April 12, 2002

  I got a wave of reactions to my recent note about inventory turns as the best indicator of a lean transformation. No one argued with my basic point, but some thought I was using the wrong numbers in the numerator or denominator. Many others simply asked how they should make the calculation at the… read more »

• Getting Back to Basics
  March 19, 2002

  I recently had a request from a Detroit newspaper to write a brief piece for the Motor Show on how American car companies can get turned in the right direction. In reading it over, I realized that my advice would be the same for any company in any industry in any country, so I thought I would pass… read more »

• LEI’s new tool for seeing the big picture
  March 1, 2002

  Value stream maps help us see our Current State so we can implement Future States with more flow, leveled pull, and less waste. We’re delighted that 85,000 members of the lean community have now used Mike Rother and John Shook’s “Learning to See” to map value streams within… read more »

• LEI's New Indicator That Can't Lie
  February 22, 2002

  I’m often asked by operations managers how they can know if their firm is really getting lean. My answer is simple: Just check your inventory “turns.” If they aren’t going steadily up, you can be sure you aren’t getting lean no matter how many future state maps you may… read more »

• An LEI New Year's Resolution: No Wallpaper!
  January 8, 2002

  New Year's resolutions are a bit of a cliche so I've modified the tradition this year: I've made my resolution on your behalf! I've resolved that in 2002 no one in the lean community will turn their value stream maps into corporate wallpaper by failing to actually implement their Future States.… read more »

• Shopping for a Sensei
  December 19, 2001

  I've just been reading that the slump in U.S. manufacturing is now deeper than the 1991-92 recession, meaning that the U.S. is now in the sad state last experienced in 1981-82. Meanwhile Japanese manufacturing, except for a few successful car companies like Toyota and Honda, is falling back into… read more »

• Lean Alternative to "Spaghetti World"
  November 28, 2001

  I wanted to share with you some thoughts on lean thinking in a time of uncertainty that Dan Jones and I recently put together at the request of "Automotive News." (Read story.) Our key point is that it's now time to re-think the connectivity costs of the "spaghetti world" we've… read more »

• 10 Lean Steps for Surviving the Recession
  November 20, 2001

  I have just read in the papers that it's official: We're in a recession that started as early as March of 2001. (Has anyone in manufacturing doubted this?) In addition, the world situation continues to be turbulent -- despite military successes and robust (but profitless) car sales -- and it is… read more »

• The Human Side of Hard Times
  October 31, 2001

  In my last message, I noted that harder times call for leaner thinking and presented an action plan. But what about the human side? Lean thinking requires that everyone at every level put in their best efforts and this isn't plausible if employees don't feel their employer is fair in the downturn.… read more »

• Action Plan for Hard Times
  October 23, 2001

  Last week I pointed out that the big leaps in applying lean thinking have all been made in hard times. I therefore urged everyone to seize the opportunity forced on us by the recession. But just what should you do? Here's my advice, based on careful observation of the two previous recessions… read more »

• Leaner Thinking for Harder Times
  October 16, 2001

  I've been studying lean thinking and its spread for nearly twenty-five years and I've learned something very important for the current moment: the great lean leaps are always made in times of economic stress. Taiichi Ohno at Toyota was able to push the Toyota Production System (TPS) through the… read more »

• Nonsense about JIT
  October 4, 2001

  In the days since the terrible events of September 11 we've seen many mentions in the American media of the impracticality of Just-in-Time supply of parts and calls for massive warehouses to buffer supply chains. The problem, of course, is that this advice is wrong, and it's hurtful to those of you… read more »