Rating: 
Summary: This is the business bible!
Review: As a strategic planning consultant, I recommend 'Lean Thinking' to all of my clients. Some mistakenly view this book as a 'how to' for manufacturing companies. While it is, it is also much more. It is an attitude about business strategy. Waste, in any type of company, drains profits in one of two ways: as direct costs that they can see today, and as indirect costs when waste discourages repeat business. For any business manager worth his or her six figure income, this book is a must read.
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Summary: Effective Manufacturing without any generic MBA language
Review: I rank the book amongst the better books that I have read along with the Goal. The book is easy to understand and yet is specific in certain systems and means for measuring waste in an organization. This is refreshing when compared to some of the books on lean manufacturing written by authors who are primarily catering to MBA's and other non technical personnel. These authors rarely have specific solutions and are full of buzzwords which their readers can quote in presentations and meetings, even though the concept may not be applicable in the environment they work in. The only disappointment with the book is that just like all other books in Lean Manufacturing, the examples used are always in dicrete or batch processing and never in a continuous environment with significant set up times which are inevitable. If you work in a discrete or batch process where set up times are small or non existent and inventory turns are low, the book is a great application.
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Summary: Lots of generalities & buzzwords, little usable examples
Review: I was disappointed in this tape. (The book may be better. I have not read it) The tape is a couple of hours of generalities. More like a promo for the author's consulting business. Without business specifics, without some detail on how the results were accomplished, I did not find it useful.
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Summary: Great, if you like stories about business.
Review: I'm not sure who the audience is for Lean Thinking. Call me naïve, but I assumed it was written by Womack and Jones to help organizations analyze their business processes and eliminate muda (Japanese for "waste"), thereby improving overall performance. However, after reading almost 250 pages of anecdotal success stories, the chapter entitled "Action Plan," where one would assume resides the punch-line of the text, I was met by the profound advice to "Get the knowledge" by hiring one of the numerous experts in North America, Europe or Japan, and read some of the "vast literature" available on lean techniques. Reminds me of the Steve Martin joke where he tells you how to be a millionaire. "First, get a million dollars."After reading Lean Thinking, I'm struck by the irony that while the authors recommend removing waste from the manner by which your products are delivered to the end customer, they don't take their own advice. The text could have been distilled from 384 pages down to five or six, since there's no real substantive instruction on how to implement lean principles. Then again, maybe I completely misinterpreted the intent of the authors as to their audience and it really was written for the business historian who enjoys reading about how Pratt & Whitney started in 1855. That must be it, because after I ponder the title, I realize that Lean Thinking is for just that, thinking. What I really wanted was a book entitled Lean Doing.
Rating:
Summary: Great, if you like stories about business.
Review: I'm not sure who the audience is for Lean Thinking. Call me naïve, but I assumed it was written by Womack and Jones to help organizations analyze their business processes and eliminate muda (Japanese for "waste"), thereby improving overall performance. However, after reading almost 250 pages of anecdotal success stories, the chapter entitled "Action Plan," where one would assume resides the punch-line of the text, I was met by the profound advice to "Get the knowledge" by hiring one of the numerous experts in North America, Europe or Japan, and read some of the "vast literature" available on lean techniques. Reminds me of the Steve Martin joke where he tells you how to be a millionaire. "First, get a million dollars." After reading Lean Thinking, I'm struck by the irony that while the authors recommend removing waste from the manner by which your products are delivered to the end customer, they don't take their own advice. The text could have been distilled from 384 pages down to five or six, since there's no real substantive instruction on how to implement lean principles. Then again, maybe I completely misinterpreted the intent of the authors as to their audience and it really was written for the business historian who enjoys reading about how Pratt & Whitney started in 1855. That must be it, because after I ponder the title, I realize that Lean Thinking is for just that, thinking. What I really wanted was a book entitled Lean Doing.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for all companies - breaks paradigms!
Review: If you are interested in learning how to really make significant breakthroughs in the value chain, this book is a must. The book has many great examples and then goes on to give you a process to follow for improving your own company and its value chain. The book gives practical advances that can be made in reducing buffer sizes (if you're into Drum-Buffer-Rope - if not you should read The Race by Goldratt). Inventory turns of over 100 times are available if you stick with the program and make it really work. Quick gains are readily available as well. We have combined this with Constraint Management and Drum Buffer Rope for a highly effective manufacturing process.
Rating:
Summary: Better "Lean" than "Machine"
Review: If you are just starting out learning about Lean Manufacturing, start with this book. It's one of those rare occasions where the sequel was better than the original. If you only have time for one and wondering where to start, "The Machine that Changed the World" is a historically important book but "Lean Thinking" is the one that actually gets you started toward implementation.
Rating:
Summary: Better "Lean" than "Machine"
Review: If you are just starting out learning about Lean Manufacturing, start with this book. It's one of those rare occasions where the sequel was better than the original. If you only have time for one and wondering where to start, "The Machine that Changed the World" is a historically important book but "Lean Thinking" is the one that actually gets you started toward implementation.
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Read!
Review: James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones sound a battle cry against institutional waste. What a pity, they say, that so much time, energy, and money are needlessly thrown away. They urge executives to redefine their values based on customer experiences and to track the flow of value from manufacturing to final sale. The result, they promise, is that companies will save time, energy and money - and will revolutionize their entire organizations in the bargain. Not content to simply study western problem-solving methods, the worldly authors guide their readers through a wide array of Japanese manufacturing wisdom as well. Their generosity and depth make this a pleasantly informative book, which defies the current trend in business books of proclaiming doom and then offering a quick fix. This book would rather proclaim hope, which is just one of the reasons that we [...] recommend it to serious managers who want to trim the fat.
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Summary: Great Ideas, But Now How?
Review: Lean Thinking does an excellent job of detailing what is wrong with the standard business processes in North America and pretty much the rest of the world. The authors also do a very good job of introducing (I hadn't yet read The Machine that Changed the World) and explaining their ideas to make clear that there is a much better way available to companies.
I have long been a big believer that all employees are valuable resources that are all to often wasted due to 'right sizing' efforts to achieve immediate monetary targets. Lean Thinking has total employee involvement as a basic pillar of the theory.
The business examples they provide are bulletproof, and definitely make the case that what they suggest can be done.
The problems I had with the book had to do with credibly backing up many of the claims the authors make, like " quality always zooms when flow and pull thinking are put in place together." Is there any hard evidence to back up this assertion? No in the book. The authors make many guarantees about eye-popping improvements their theory will bring if it is implemented correctly.
Implementation is where I have the biggest problem with this book. Womack and Jones certainly do a good job of explaining their theory and backing it up with impeccable examples, but it all adds up to another book in which the authors tell you what you HAVE to do, but not how to do it. It is my opinion that made yet another contribution to the Knowing-Doing Gap (Pfeffer and Sutton, HBS Press 2000). The great ideas contained in the book lack any real, concrete action steps for successful implementation and so will rarely be successfully implemented.
It is similar to all of the talk about innovation. Everyone knows that it is important to do it, but few actually do it because they don't know how. It's not as simple as snapping your fingers. How do you actually go about involving all of your employees? I myself would involve the Simplex process (1995, The Power of Innovation, M.S. Basadur), but that's just me. The same logic applies to almost every section of the last third of the book. I kept saying to myself, "Wow, that's easier said than done."
The book leaves it to the reader to essentially make it up for themselves to make lean thinking a reality in their organization.
I realize that it would be impossible to provide a step-by-step action plan that woud fit any company or situation, but the authors could have done more than offer "Find a change agent." Gee, thanks for the tip! By the end of the book I realized why the implementation side of the book was so thin - the book is a marketing tool for the authors and their associates. Near the end of the book the reader is told to get a sensei, and hey, there happen to be alot of them in Japan you can hire! Also, we, the authors, do speaking engagements if you want to hire us!
The book is definitely a worthwhile read, as it does open the eyes to the reader of a better way of operating, how far away we currently are from it, and how we are all affected by it.
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