Leading Lean

Chapter 2. The Modern Lean Framework™

Agility—the ability to respond to changing conditions—is a skill that you must develop so that you can lead from a holistic perspective. The levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) are just too high nowadays to lead in any other way.

Lean embraces and fosters agility by instilling a spirit of challenge and the confidence to pursue elusive perfection head-on. It grounds you in the reality that perfection is unobtainable but also drives you forward along the path to continuous improvement. In this chapter, we’ll look at the origins of Lean (as defined and developed by the Toyota Motor Corporation) and the Modern Lean Framework^™, which will provide you with a road map to follow when developing and perfecting these Lean skills and abilities. This framework will show you how to stave off extinction through continuous evolution and develop the mindset required to embrace and exploit agility.

Staving Off Extinction through Continuous Evolution

Today, leaders spend millions of dollars trying to figure out the “secret sauce” that made the success of start-ups like Amazon and Google look so easy. However, I would bet that if you asked Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, whether he felt like success was easy, he would probably laugh. Amazon was founded in 1994 in Bezos’s garage,¹ taking almost ten years to turn a profit.² There is no quick or easy fix, and modeling yourself after other companies isn’t going to work. Companies are ...