Lean

Innovative Lean: A Guide to Releasing the Untapped Gold in Your Organisation to Engage Employees, Drive Out Waste, and Create Prosperity

The management of ideas is, in many companies, a huge untapped or poorly underutilized resource. Yet, ideas are the prime source of improvement and innovation. Moreover, good idea management brings with it a change in the culture of an organization, leading to new levels of co-operation and mutual respect. Without effective idea management, a Lean programme will founder. This book is based on several years of hands-on and case study research. It brings together the best current thinking on idea management. Throughout the book, the management of ideas is interlinked with Lean thinking on flow, continuous improvement, surfacing issues, and problem solving.

Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

This book extends the ideas presented in the authors’ 1990 book, The Machine that Changed the World. The approach, called lean thinking, begins with the customer, defines value, develops a value-stream of activities for a specific product, and makes the value-stream flow smoothly with the pull of the customer. Part II of the book provides an action plan to make these ideas a reality. The plan is based on experiences in 50 lean companies. Examples are included of applications at small and large organizations. Part III extends these ideas to the entire organization including the design of new products.