Individual chapters from The Birth of Lean, each one an interview with one of the Toyota leaders, such as Taiichi Ohno, who helped create the Toyota Production System (TPS), now are available as individual chapter downloads, according to its publisher, the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute.
The Birth of Lean chapters are available for $4.99 each. The ebook is $9.99 and the softcover version is available for $40. Chapter 2, What I Learned From Taiichi Ohno , is available for free.
Lean Leaders
The Birth of Lean, made available outside Japan by LEI in 2009 for the first time, is a series of extremely frank interviews and talks with the managers who created TPS in the 1950s and 1960s.
The book captures the insights and tenacity of those early leaders in their own words. These early innovators reveal that they had no grand plan, just a commitment to continual experimentation, and a laser-like focus on the workplace.
Readers will hear from the leaders who created the world’s first lean management system:
- Chapter 1 – How It All Began, an interview with Taiichi Ohno, the primary developer of TPS who in 1946 turned a Toyota machine shop into a laboratory for ideas that led to the development of kanban, flow-based production, and other innovations
- Chapter 2 (FREE) – What I Learned From Taiichi Ohno, a talk by Michikazu Tanaka, the manager and executive at Toyota affiliate Daihatsu who adapted TPS to his organization
- Chapter 3 – Putting a Pull System in Place at Toyota, two talks by Kikuo Suzumura, the Toyota manager recognized as the most influential in translating Ohno’s ideas into actionable items
- Chapter 4 – The Evolution of Buffering at Toyota, remarks by Kaneyoshi Kusunoki, the former head of Toyota’s production engineering organization who refined the buffering system in use in Toyota’s operations
- Chapter 5 – Total Quality Control and the Toyota Production System, a talk by Masao Nemoto, the Toyota executive central to the deployment of TQC at Toyota
- Chapter 6 – The Guiding Management Perspective, two interviews with Eiji Toyoda, the former Toyota president and chairman who oversaw the development of TPS and the inclusion of total quality control (TQC) at Toyota.
By understanding how a powerful new management system was developed through simple experiments, the book will encourage readers to begin their own experiments to transform their organizations.
Lean Community Resources
The terms lean manufacturing, lean production, or lean management refer to a complete business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, customer relations, and the overall enterprise that requires less capital, material, space, time, or human effort to produce products and services with fewer defects to precise customer desires, compared with traditional modern management.
LEI’s offers a weekly newsletter with lean management news and resources such as case studies, webinars, interviews with executives on lean leadership, and archives of essays by authors and lean management thought leaders John Shook, LEI CEO, and Jim Womack, LEI founder.
The Birth of Lean
• Editors: Koichi Shimokawa and Takahiro Fujimoto
• Translators: Brian Miller with John Shook, LEI CEO
• Publisher: Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc.
• ISBN: 978-1-934109-22-9
• Number of Pages: 284
• List Prices: Individual chapters: $4.99 each; ebook $9.99; softcover $40
Lean Enterprise Institute
Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., was founded in 1997 by management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., as a nonprofit research, education, publishing, and conference company with a mission to advance lean thinking around the world. We teach courses, hold management seminars, write and publish books and workbooks, and organize public and private conferences. We use the surplus revenues from these activities to conduct research projects and support other lean initiatives such as the Lean Education Academic Network, Lean Global Network and the Healthcare Value Network. Lean Enterprise Institute and the leaper image are registered trademarks of Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc.
Media: Chet Marchwinski, cmarchwinski@lean.org , 617-871-2930