Best-Selling Book on Toyota Reissued; Lean Enterprise Institute Founder Warns About Automaker's Future

The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) is a nonprofit training, publishing, and research company.

CAMBRIDGE, MA UNITED STATES 03/21/2007

Car maker will stumble if it fails to maintain its lean management system;
lean management applied to retail, air travel, healthcare and services of
any type is the next revolution in business.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., May 15 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On the heels of
reissuing the best-selling Machine That Changed the World, which explains
Toyota's recent success in passing General Motors, author James P. Womack
warned that the automaker will lose its momentum if it fails to sustain the
business system that has made it the world's most consistently successful
industrial enterprise.

"Toyota's great risk -- in fact, the way it can lose -- is if the many
new managers being hired and its many new suppliers fail to embrace
Toyota's lean management system," said Womack, the founder and chairman of
the Lean Enterprise Institute, a non-profit education, publishing,
conferencing, and research center founded in 1997.

"If this happens," continued Womack, "and its new managers and
suppliers revert to the old, mass-production mentality they learned in
school and from working with mass-production firms, Toyota's management
performance will regress toward the mean. Instead of moving the whole world
to embrace lean management, Toyota will become just another company. And
that will be a tragic failure for all of us."

The term "lean management" is widely used today in manufacturing
industries. It refers to the revolutionary business system pioneered by
Toyota to create a wide variety of goods in lower volumes with less human
effort, capital investment, space, and development time, and with fewer
product defects and injuries to employees. Recently Womack, in his book
Lean Solutions, has extended the concept of lean management to service
industries ranging from healthcare to retail to air travel to finance.

Lean management calls for firms to make managers responsible for the
horizontal flow of products or services across departments to customers.
This balances the traditional tendency of enterprises to focus on vertical
"silos" such as departments or divisions, which are good for organizing
knowledge and career paths but mediocre at delivering true customer needs.

Womack first formulated these ideas in The Machine That Changed the
World in 1990, with co-authors Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos. Their massive
multi- year study of the auto industry conducted at MIT described for the
first time the product development, supplier management, customer support,
and production elements of the lean system as organized by lean management.
The book, now reissued by Simon & Schuster, includes a new foreword and
afterword by the authors to bring the story up to date at the point when
Toyota has just passed General Motors (in the first quarter of 2007) as the
world's largest and most profitable producer of motor vehicles.

"The book's most important contribution is to describe the complete
lean business system, which is a new way of managing multi-function
organizations that is relevant to any organization creating any type of
value," said Womack.

"The heart of lean management is to focus relentlessly on improving
value- creating processes as they run across functions and technologies
toward the customer. The lean manager's most important methods are strategy
deployment at the top of the organization to define the organization's
purpose, problem solving based on the scientific method by line managers in
the middle of the organization, and standardized work by managers and
primary workers at operational levels," said Womack.

"Together, these methods, when employed by managers with clear
responsibility for perfecting the flow of value, will permit any
organization in any industry or activity to thrive in the 21st century.
They constitute the next leap in the long evolution of management methods,"
he said.

About the Lean Enterprise Institute
Based in Cambridge, Mass, the Lean Enterprise Institute is a 501(c)(3)
nonprofit education, publication, conferencing, and research center founded
in 1997 by James P. Womack. LEI helps organizations transform themselves
into lean enterprises. Its workshops and workbooks teach lean tools like
value- stream mapping and A3 analysis. Its management seminars and books
help managers develop the leadership behaviors that sustain lean
enterprises. Its conferences showcase firms making lean breakthroughs. And
its Lean Enterprise Partners research program with a small number of
enterprises tests new approaches to lean management. For more information
visit LEI at http://www.lean.org .


SOURCE Lean Enterprise Institute

 

The book sounds like a good read, as long as it's not long-winded. Perhaps the Cliff's Notes version?

 

And? The exact same thing could have been said about Toyota 10, 20, even 30 years ago. If, maybe, possibly, but ... there is nothing concrete or absolute to indicate that Toyota WILL fail ... simply, there are only a bunch of assumptions and opinions.