Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation » (Abridged)

James P. Womack is the president and founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute (www.lean.org), a nonprofit education and research organization based in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Daniel T. Jones is the chairman and founder of the Lean Enterprise Academy (www.leanuk.org), a nonprofit education and research organization based in the UK.

Lean Thinking begins by helping listeners to identify value, asking, "What does the customer really want?" instead of "What can we try to convince the customer to accept?" Lean thinkers then identify the value stream -- every step required to move a specific good or service from initial concept into the hands of the customer -- for each product and ask if each step really creates value. Those that don't -- the great majority -- are then removed, and the remaining steps are conducted in continuous flow at the pull of the customer, as the firm manages toward perfection. As a consequence, lead times, costs of all sorts, and defects shrink, while responsiveness to customer needs and selling prices increase.

In an...

Publishers Weekly

There's a missionary zeal to this book for corporate managers: it wants to convert companies the world over to the streamlined production process pioneered by Toyota after WWII.

Womack and Jones chronicled Toyota's concept of lean production in The Machine That Changed the World, and embarked in 1990 on a tour of North America, Europe and Japan to persuade organizations, managers, employers and investors that mass production was out of date and should be chucked for something better. They formed a network of companies and individuals dedicated to lean production. Network members, whose stories form the basis of the book, gather annually to update procedures and refine theory. Showa Manufacturing, a Japanese maker of radiators and boilers, for instance, pulled itself out of an earnings slump by changing from mass-producing batches of standardized equipment to producing customized small lots.

Heavily laden with details, this is for specialists who want to streamline. It makes few references to the larger, global economy.