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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: 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.
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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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Summary: Good Top-Level Book, Good Explanation of Lean Principles
Review: Lean Thinking has its strengths. The authors do a good job of explaining the principles behind lean manufacturing and show good data from varied case studies to convey the value in implementing lean manufacturing. They make a strong case that these principles can reduce waste and costs, reduce lead times, and improve quality and resource utilization. This book is not a practical guide, however. I found it to be somewhat of a "warm and fuzzy" overview aimed at top execs and business strategists as opposed to plant, production, and manufacturing managers. The details of certain key roadblocks aren't addressed, for example: 1. Across the board firings of managers who oppose lean principles. Not as easy as it sounds. 2. Vastly improving changeover times and rearranging big machinery without a generous budget. 3. Making radical changes on your shop floor despite heavy production demands. 4. Dealing with a union that is not willing to concede the initial layoff without a massive war, despite a company crises. There are many others. One thing that I got a kick out of - when Japanese consultants were called in to implement lean changes in a plant, they began taking machinery apart and moving it themselves. At many plants I've seen, if a foreign consultant were to do that, he'd probably be shot before he made it out of the parking lot. Though the authors are self-admitedly theorists and the book lacks a lot of "nuts and bolts" detail, they do a good job of teaching the principles and laying out the results.
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Summary: Playing with Fire
Review: The principals in this book are sound. However, top management must make the full commitment and follow the principals as defined. Trying to shortcut the process will have detrimental results if not disastrous. The concepts in this book my sound very radical but in actuality are common sense. And that is the pitfall. I have seen where a company makes a commitment toward lean manufacturing. But somewhere along the line management thinks they can modify the principals or they begin to not see immediate results and they don't follow the plan to fruition. They end up losing money or their shirt! The hard way is always the easiest way. If you own your own company or are trying to sell this concept to management in your present work environment, it is important that everyone in the organization makes a commitment to Lean thinking. Do not cut corners and stay the course. Don't play with fire.
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Summary: A Roadmap for Efficient Value Creation
Review: Would you like to double productivity, cut development time by 60%, reduce inventory by 65%, reduce throughput time by 95%, reduce capital investment while doubling sales? Pre-existing assets, technologies, practices, organizations and concepts often cause enormous waste, i.e. activity which does not create value. This exciting book is about a way to do more and more with less and less - to create value instead of waste. Lean Principles
1. Accurately understand VALUE (needs and preferences) from the customer's perspective. 2. Perform VALUE STREAM analysis. This will reveal three types of actions: 1) those that create value, 2) those that do not create value but are unavoidable in the present situation and 3) those that don't create value and are immediately avoidable. 3. After eliminating avoidable waste activities, make the remaining activities continuously FLOW. This requires the elimination of departmentalized "high speed" batch-and-queue "efficiency". It requires quick changeovers, "right-sizing" and close coupling of operations without buffers. The authors state that the results are always a dramatic reduction of effort and improvement in throughput. 4. Because of the radical reduction achieved in throughput time, you now are capable of Just In Time operations. You can now let the customer PULL the product. 5. Finally search for PERFECTION. Perfection is, of course, impossible. But the effort compels progress. "Just Do It"
The lean approach is to "just do it" with dedicated cross functional product teams which often include suppliers and customers. The beauty of this system is that it won't work at all unless everything works properly all the time. Thus 100% performance becomes an absolute requirement. The authors present a number of very interesting case studies in which dramatic results were obtained. They conclude with advice as to how to get started - including a list of available resources. This book is especially well-suited to operations managers, but will also benefit any executive in a company that relies upon operational excellence as a part of their strategy. (Robert Bradford is CEO of Center for Simplified Strategic Planning and co-author of Simplified Strategic Planning)
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