
Lean Product Development: e Mastery of Innovation • 13
THE HISTORY OF LEAN THINKING
“Lean” is not an acronym or a synonym for “cut the fat.” It is the word
that MIT graduate student John Krafcik rst used in 1988 to denote
a few automotive companies that had achieved outstanding results
year aer year as documented in MIT’s International Motor Vehicle
Research Project. In 1990, the project’s leaders, James Womack and
Daniel T. Jones, published their results in e Machine at Changed
the World and “Lean” became a management buzzword—but one
with extraordinary sticking power. Twenty-two years later, it is hard
to nd a U.S. manufacturing orga ...