Name: Lean thinking
ISBN: 9780684810355

Lean thinking

"After a decade of downsizing and reengineering, most companies in North America, Europe, and Japan are still stuck, searching for a formula for sustainable growth and success. The problem, as Womack and Jones explain in Lean Thinking, is that managers have lost sight of value for the customer and how to create it. By focusing on their existing organizations and outdated definitions of value, managers create waste, and the economies of the advanced countries continue to stagnate.". "What's needed instead is lean thinking to help managers clearly specify value, to line up all the value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream, and to make value flow smoothly at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection. The first part of the book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples.". "As Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates, these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry, routinely doubling both productivity and sales while stabilizing employment. But most managers will need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world - including Pratt & Whitney, Porsche, and Toyota.".

What Hacker News says

mjulFeb 2023

The Toyota Production System was established during Shoichiro Toyoda's leadership. It is the company's "operating system" if you will, and has made an enormous impact, both in the auto industry and in other fields such as IT.

"Lean" manufacturing, a term from Womack & Jones, is based on their research into this.

If you want to dive in, here is my reading list for essential books on how Toyota came to build high quality cars at scale, and how it transfers to other disciplines.

W. Edwards Deming - the grand old man of the field, building on a strict statistical discipline. His book "Out of the Crisis" is a wonderful treatise on his thinking including his famous "14 Points for Management". This is definitely a must read that will change the way you think about management and quality. Deming provided the inspiration for the quality movement that powered post-war Japanese manufacturing.

Taiichi Ohno - one of the greatest industrial innovators of the 20th century, the father of the Toyota Production System. After spending his career relentlessly optimizing manufacturing at Toyota he wrote the book "Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production" that describes his work.

Womack & Jones - Their books are great and it is well worth to read them all to see a lot of the principles and case studies for lean thinking. Also, it is quite interesting to see that software development is now rediscovering some of the things that manufacturing learned much earlier - in the case of Toyota as early as in the 1950s and 1960s. Begin your studies with "The Machine That Changed the World", a five-year study of the global auto industry from MIT and go on with the "Lean Thinking" and "Lean Solutions". They give a fascinating perspective on manufacturing and plenty of examples of the lean principles and they applications. These are the books that brought lean to the mainstream.

Mary and Tom Poppendieck - with a background in manufacturing and software they were leading the effort to translate the concepts of lean to software development. They have written two great books, "Implementing Lean Software Development" and "Lean Software Development - an Agile Toolkit". Both books are well worth reading a present a both the principles and lot of cases in a friendly, colloquial manner. Highly recommended!

Matthew May - I really like his approach to elegance and simplicity. May has worked with Toyota and their corporate university and his book "The Elegant Solution" offers insight into their innovation process - the principles it is built on and the practices that make it work.

Jeffrey Liker - his "The Toyota Way" is a very good introduction to the application of lean methods at Toyota. This is one of the best lean books I have read. Definitely a favourite!

This list covers up to around 10 years ago. Please comment with recommendations for more recent books on the topic.

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mark_undoioFeb 2022

I'm a fan of Womack & Jones's "Lean Thinking". This is all about Lean manufacturing, which I think is partly rooted in Deming's work. The focus is more on how to optimise the overall system than the management of individuals.

The content of that book isn't directly applicable to e.g. software companies but if you think a bit you can see quite a lot of analogous situations (e.g. warehoused inventory is incomplete projects or not-yet-shipped code, "monuments" could be inappropriate central test / build systems, etc).

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mvellandiMar 2020

I graduated in international business and logistics 14 years ago, worked at a freight forwarder, customs broker, ocean carrier, and a manufacturer. Broadly, this topic can be broken up into 3 overlapping concerns: - Operations (product, plant, human/physical resources) - Supply Chain (production, network inflows/outflows) - Logistics (warehousing, transportation)

All care about having reliable partners, quality, efficiency, and timing (procurement, production, and fulfillment). I recommend you do a combination of lightweight textbooks for a high level overview, (like Wiley "for dummies") and a few case study style books that provide history and deep context (like "The Goal" and "Lean Thinking" by James Womack). These last two books are classics dealing with physical production. However, don't overlook service operations like healthcare and military which are good examples where the end customers primary concern is strategic procurement and distribution. I don't have any recommendations for these industries but maybe someone else.

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dilemmaJun 2017

Check out the book Lean Thinking.

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technologyNov 2011

The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, & Problem Solving by Barbara Minto (http://www.amazon.com/Pyramid-Principle-Writing-Thinking-Pro...)

Some Mental Models are available here for free :

http://www.focusinvestor.com/FocusSeriesPart3.pdf

http://www.focusinvestor.com/MungerModels.pdf

For systems :

Lean Thinking by James Womack

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Some thought provoking personal effectiveness titles :

The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz (http://www.amazon.com/Four-Agreements-Practical-Personal-Fre...)

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less by Barry Schwartz (http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Choice-Why-More-Less/dp/006000...)

The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz

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leegonzalesMar 2011

The realization which the proponents of lean products and software have had is that there are many strategies which have proven incredibly effective in other domains and that they can also be used to make products, business models and ultimately organizations better, faster and cheaper.

Simply put lean startups result from the combination of lean manufacturing principals and maneuver warfare (agility) principals combined and used in business. Which if you want to boil it down further could be thought of as using the scientific method as quickly and efficiently as possible to create organizations and products where teams have fully adopted a culture of continuos improvement.

Lean is probably best known for its ability to enable Toyota to be the amazing manufacturing organization they have been (ignoring recent growth related fuckups). See the book Lean Thinking or the many Lean Software books to see the ways in which people have translated Lean concepts to software development. Of course if you want to really grok lean in the context of making products you should study http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Product-Development-Flow-Ge...

Agile principals as codified by the god father of agile strategic thinking, John Boyd would be the other crucial element to lean startups. He is famous for driving maneuver warfare doctrine into the US military establishment and codifying some of the most advanced strategies and concepts regarding the nature of competition, agility and strategy. If you have seen the OODA loop or heard the phrase operating inside the enemies decision cycle then you have seen his work in action. See the book Certain to Win by Chet Richards for a good primer on Boyds work.

These concepts rigorously and intentionally applied to developing products, teams and companies are IMO what makes a startup lean.

And of course if you are interested, you can also read Eric Ries or Steve Blanks blogs.

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