
215
Chapter 9
Leading a Lean Operation
Leadership is a topic that applies more broadly than Lean management,
to be sure. It is regularly discussed whenever the subject is organizational
change. A Lean conversion initiative is properly and usefully thought of as
this kind of change, as well as a change in the technical ins and outs of
production systems. That is because good engineering does not by itself
make for effective change, not by a long shot. Without effective leadership,
most large-scale changes in systems do not go well and do not perform up
to advertised expectations.
This is emphatically true for Lean conversions because, as I have ...