Lean Thinking
James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones · 1996
Womack and Jones distill the Toyota Production System into five principles: specify value, map the value stream, create flow, let customers pull, and pursue perfection. Backed by real turnarounds, it shows how to double productivity while slashing time, errors, and inventory.
The definitive field guide to Toyota-style lean, distilling decades of factory-floor wins into five principles any organization can apply to banish waste.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Lean Thinking pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Value must be defined by the end customer, not by your existing assets or departments. The critical first act of lean thinking is rethinking value from the customer's standpoint, because producing the wrong good or service efficiently is just muda (waste).
- Map the entire value stream, the full set of actions to bring a product from concept to launch and order to delivery. Doing so exposes three kinds of steps: those that create value, those that create no value but are currently unavoidable, and pure waste to be eliminated now.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Antidote to Muda
- Principle One: Specify Value
- Principle Two: Identify the Value Stream
- Principle Three: Create Flow
- Principle Four: Let the Customer Pull
- Principle Five: Pursue Perfection
- Lean in Action: Real Turnarounds
- Sustaining the Lean Enterprise
Finish Lean Thinking tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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