Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 28, 2010 – The nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) today announced that its board of directors has appointed John Shook as chairman and CEO, succeeding James P. Womack, Ph.D., the company’s founder.
The board elected Shook at its regularly scheduled meeting on Sept. 27. Womack, who led the MIT research team that coined the term “lean production,” announced the CEO succession plan in August 2010. He founded LEI in 1997 to advance lean principles around the world.
While he has stepped down from a management role, Womack will remain at LEI as a senior advisor, continuing to write and participate in research.
Shook has written or co-authored several important lean management books and articles, including LEI’s Learning to See workbook that established value-stream mapping as a tool used worldwide to identify and eliminate sources of nonvalue-adding activities and for system redesign. In Managing to Learn Shook described for the first time the dynamics of lean management and leadership and how they are supported by the A3 management process.
Shook was the first American manager at Toyota’s headquarters in Japan and helped the automaker transfer its lean management system to North America and around the world. He was a senior advisor to LEI since 1997.
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 and the Lean Global Network. Visit https://www.lean.org for more information.
Join LEI’s Lean Community at lean.org for access to case studies, webinars, weekly newsletters, John Shook’s Lean Management column, Jim Womack’s thought-leading e-letters, and many other resources for your lean transformation.
Media: Chet Marchwinski, cmarchwinski@lean.org, (617) 871-2930
– RSS news feed: http://www.pitchengine.com/rss.php?id=14266
– Follow on Twitter: leanthinking
– Become a Facebook Fan: LeanEnterpriseInstitute
– Connect on LinkedIn: Chet Marchwinski