part0030

Our problem in writing this book was never theory. Authors with academic backgrounds will generally have no trouble spinning theories, and this task happily occupied us during the first year of this project (1992–93). But then we needed proof that our theorizing actually works, examples of real managers in real firms who are succeeding by employing ideas similar to ours. This threatened to become a serious problem because we really knew only one industry—automobiles—yet we were determined to apply our ideas to every type of economic activity, including services. It was essential therefore to find chief executives from a wide range of industries in North America, Europe, and Japan who would let us use their experiences, both good and bad, to prove our theories.

Just as we identified this need in the spring of 1993, Joe Day, the CEO of the Freudenberg-NOK General Partnership, asked one of us to talk at a media presentation of his firm’s lean initiative. In doing this we met Anand Sharma, whose consulting firm, TBM, was offering technical advice to Freudenberg-NOK. Anand soon introduced us to a host of other executives he has advised on the lean conversion including Pat Lancaster at Lantech and George Koenigsaecker at the Hon Company.

At almost the same time, through the MIT Japan Program, Jim Womack came into contact with United Technologies (a Program sponsor) and its subsidiary, Pratt & Whitney. An invitation to visit Pratt led to a completely accidental meeting in the final assembly hall with Chihiro Nakao, one of Pratt’s key advisers on its lean transformation.

Nakao-san, as it developed, had along with Yoshiki Iwata of Shingijutsu taught lean thinking to Anand Sharma in the late 1980s, and later collaborated with him on some projects. The Shingijutsu network soon carried us all the way across the world to Porsche in Germany; to Hitachi, Yamatake-Honeywell, and Showa Tekko in Japan; and back to other firms in North America.

While visiting one of these (the PCI Group in New Bedford, Massachusetts) with Chihiro Nakao, we encountered another link in our North American chain in the person of Bill Moffitt, a former Jacobs Manufacturing Company vice president and survivor of the Nakao school of “special sensei treatment.” He and his associates have been a transforming force in ten of the firms mentioned in this book.

Because the concepts presented in The Machine That Changed the World were devised originally by Toyota, it was not surprising that the next link we discovered was Toyota’s own Supplier Support Center (TSSC) in Lexington, Kentucky, where General Manager Hajime Ohba was cheerfully teaching lean thinking to forty American firms, many of them neither suppliers to Toyota nor in the auto sector. Ohba-san took us under his wing and escorted us through a range of companies trying to transform themselves into exemplars of lean thinking. (One of our major regrets in preparing this book is that TSSC’s clients were only at the beginning of the lean transformation when we had to decide in 1994 which firms to profile. If we had started this volume a year or two later, the achievements of TSSC’s clients, like Grand Haven Stamped Products, might well have been described.)

Once we started down the path with Toyota, we found two additional networks, those of Toyota Motor Sales in California (whose dramatic success in introducing “pull” all the way from the customer back to raw materials was the subject of Chapter 4 ) and of the Toyota Motor Corporation in Japan, where Kiyotaka Nakayama of Toyota’s Operations Management Consulting Division led us through today’s Toyota operations and the supply base.

As Jim Womack searched for firms in North America, Dan Jones was searching for additional firms in Europe and found many of them through the research activities of the Lean Enterprise Research Centre at the Cardiff Business School. Unipart in particular became a test bed for lean thinking in a U.K. context.

Our final learning opportunity was completely inadvertent. Jim Womack invested in a small bicycle firm and took a hand in a lean conversion. An ancient saw in the academic world is: “If you really want to master a subject, try teaching it.” This concept turns out to apply with equal force to lean conversions: If you really want to understand the problems to be overcome, try doing it yourself.

As the reader has probably noted, we became very fond of our subjects and began to think of them as a community of like-minded souls. It was logical, therefore, to bring them together in a series of Lean Summits in North American, Europe, and Latin America beginning in 1995. As these events grew ever larger we realized that we needed to create nonprofit organizations to tie the Lean Community together. The mission of these organizations is to move beyond consciousness-raising events to create and teach tools for implementation.

The Lean Enterprise Institute was founded by Jim Womack in the United States in 1997 to publish the ideas of lean thinking in a workbook format and to teach these tools to professional audiences. Its publications and activities are described at www.lean.org .

Lean Institute Brasil was founded in 1998 by Professor Jose Ferro in Sao Paulo to promote lean thinking in Brazil and throughout Latin America. For more information, see www.lean.br.org .