Leading a Business to High Performance : The Lean Champion's Resource Guide

The Lean Champion's Resource Guide provides the knowledge and skills one needs to lead a business to high performance by implementing lean thinking. In this manner, it helps fulfill the intent of the people who contributed to developing the lean model. That intent was to enable businesses worldwide to advance the prosperity of their host countries and better the work life of industry employees (Womack, James P.; Jones, Daniel T.; and Roos, Daniel (1990) The machine that changed the world. New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers). They sought through research to uncover the more competitive approaches implemented by companies like Toyota and make them available worldwide. The lean model distills this learning. Its application can indeed enable businesses to become high performance organizations. Such enterprises generate extraordinary results that benefit all their stakeholders inclusively. They become agents and models of constructive innovation and create places where people can learn, achieve, and grow and communities can prosper. But this outcome is only possible if the implementation is successful. Many implementations are not. One major gap undermining success is the absence of a practical guide for leading a lean initiative. As Womack suggests, we need to "package lean knowledge in an easy-to-use form that guides managers step-by-step down the path to implementation of lean thinking in every value-creating activity" (Womack, James (2005). The State of Lean 2005. Email broadcast to subscribers registered at www.lean.org, 18 Jan 2005). The Lean Champion's Resource Guide narrows this gap. Its focus is on leading the lean initiative. Its contents address the full range of knowledge and tasks one must master to implement a major change initiative like lean. We direct the book to the lean champion, as the person in this role must support his or her company through learning, adopting, using, and improving lean thinking to achieve greater business success. While the book is intended to help with implementing lean initiatives, the knowledge, tasks, and tools it contains enable success in accomplishing any major change initiative. By extension, therefore, we also see the book as a change maker's guide that every manager and executive should embrace as leaders of organizations. For what is leadership, if it is not about the introduction of new ways to better accomplish one's purposes?Vitalo, Raphael L. is the author of 'Leading a Business to High Performance : The Lean Champion's Resource Guide', published 2009 under ISBN 9780972281089 and ISBN 0972281088.