How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection

Six years ago, we wrote, with Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World. The book summarized the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s study of the global automobile industry, which documented the great performance advantages that a best-in-class lean manufacturer such as Toyota had over typical mass producers in Western countries. When we presented our evidence, we feared the industrial equivalent of an immune reaction, in which managers in other regions and industries would reject lean techniques as irrelevant to their circumstances or impossible to implement. Instead, we discovered that we were battering down an open door. We encountered scores of managers in industries as diverse as aerospace and construction who told us that they were adopting lean techniques—techniques for relentlessly and continuously eliminating waste from an operation. And in that heartland of global manufacturing, the automobile industry, it was soon impossible to find a manager anywhere who did not profess to be “getting lean.”