Lean Thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones

Lean manufacturing, and now lean office/service, have captured business thinking in recent years. A powerful 1996 book, Lean Thinking, by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, set the stage for the lean revolution across America and worldwide. It's an important book for economic developers. Here is a summary of the five principles outlined in Lean Thinking.

Principle One: Specify Value--If you want to help your customers, think like them. What’s valuable to them? Their money, their time and the quality of the product or service that they receive. For them, value is not something on a chart. It’s not abstract. This can’t be stressed enough — for the customer, value is a concrete reality. Your job is to create this reality, every day, again and again.

Principle Two: Discover the Value Stream--You have a very important assignment. Think of yourself as a geographer in an unexplored rainforest. You’ve got to locate and identify the main source of water. You will meet many strange, wild and potentially dangerous creatures along the way. That’s right, you’re going to have to set foot in your own store. You’re going to have to observe your producers, your truck drivers, your low-level managers and even your customers. Be careful.

Principle Three: Create Flow--Okay, you have redefined what you mean by value, and you have figured out the geography of your value stream. Now call your own bluff. If you’re not really committed to lean thinking, this step will expose you. Why? Because it is difficult and it contradicts several traditional business methods, particularly the batch-and-queue method.

Principle Four: Use Your Pull--As your organization begins to master the technique of flow, an interesting opportunity will arise. When you cut the crap out of your processes, you’ll be producing products more quickly than you could have imagined. This gives you the chance to make the customer a fundamental part of the process. If you’re focusing on one product at a time, you can tailor the process along the way. If your customer wants an orange bike instead of a blue one, all you’ve got to do is slightly modify the flow of that order. If your employees are capably adapting to flow techniques, they’ll have no problem with the concept of customer pull.

Principle Five: Approach Perfection--Once you get all these principles rolling, you’re no longer competing with other organizations, you’re competing with yourself. How fast can you move your products? How many diverse customers can you serve? How lean can you be? Lean thinking allows you to court that unrivalled beauty, perfection, because it is a perpetually self-improving system. As you become better at listening to your customers, they become better at talking. In turn, the pull on your organization becomes stronger. This calls for a swifter flow, a stronger value stream. What looked like it was working one day will be revealed as muda the next. There’s no telling how tight this whole process can become.

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