Even once you begin to see the importance of the five lean principles, it’s often hard to imagine how to install them in your own organization without a clear example of successful practice to follow, a template for action. This needs to be specific enough to show the real nuts and bolts, but broad enough to keep the big picture in view. What’s more, the example needs to share enough of the characteristics of your situation that extrapolation is possible with confidence about the results.

We’ve therefore provided a series of examples selected from two dimensions—size and complexity, and nationality. We will begin with three American examples which progress from a small, family-owned firm with a simple product range and only a limited past to overcome, to a massive, publicly traded organization with highly complex product and process technologies, a complex supply and distribution chain, a culturally diverse, unionized workforce, and a long history to overcome of conflictual relations with its employees, customers, and suppliers.

Then we switch our focus to the three great national industrial systems by comparing the installation of lean principles in a leading German firm and in two Japanese firms of broadly varying degrees of complexity.

Your own organization is probably different from any of these in some important ways and some customization will be required. However, the examples are sufficiently broad and the results so startling that no manager can any longer claim that lean principles cannot be applied to their situation.