Lean thinking is the most important business model for competitive success today. Yet companies still struggle to sustain the business gains from their lean implementation efforts.
The most important problem for these companies is how can they advance beyond isolated gains from lean tools, such as kaizen, kanban or 5-S, to fundamentally change how they operate, think and learn.
The Lean Manager: A Novel of Lean Transformation, just published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), addresses this critical problem by showing managers and executives how to go beyond short-term gains to lean transformation.
“Every isolated effort will recede – or fail – unless companies learn to use the lean process to develop people with the ownership, initiative, and know-how to solve problems, learn, and ultimately coach new individuals in this discipline,” said James Womack, author, lean management authority, and LEI founder. “That’s why this book matters so much.”
The book follows plant manager Andrew Ward’s struggle to rethink his entire managerial approach under the guidance of no-nonsense executive Phil Jenkinson, who used lean principles to save his company in The Gold Mine.
What is Lean?
The terms lean, lean manufacturing, lean production, or lean management refer to a complete business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, customer relations, and the overall enterprise that requires less capital, material, space, time or human effort to produce products and services with fewer defects to precise customer desires, compared with traditional modern management.
Lean Enterprise Institute
The Lean Enterprise Institute Inc. was founded in 1997 by management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., as a nonprofit research, education, publishing, and conferencing company with a mission to advance lean thinking around the world. We teach courses, hold management seminars, write and publish books and workbooks, and organize public and private conferences. We use the surplus revenues from these activities to conduct research projects and support other lean initiatives such as the Lean Education Academic Network and the Lean Global Network. For more information, visit LEI at http://www.lean.org.
