Leading and Managing Lean

Chapter 1

Introduction

The underlying concept of lean management is a customer-driven philosophy for organizationwide continuous or ongoing improvement and waste elimination. Improvement and waste elimination efforts have often been referred to as kaizen. Kaizen roughly translates as good (zen) change (kai). Kaizen is a learning approach based largely on evaluating past experiences through questioning and observation. Following a lean management ­philosophy, all activities should eventually lead to enhancing customer value. If an activity does not enhance customer value, the activity should be eliminated.

Whether the setting is manufacturing, service, administration, health care, education, politics, or something else, it must be understood that ...