We concluded that the problems were twofold. One statistic in particular exposed the truth: the inventories that the North American, European, and Japanese economies need to support a given level of sales to end customers showed no evidence of leanness when adjusted for the ups and downs in the business cycle. And we found many allegedly lean product-development groups that were nothing more than compartmentalized organizations with new labels. In offices and plants, we found unlinked islands of lean operating techniques. When we looked more closely, we found plenty of just-in-time delivery systems that involved nothing more than the relocation of inventories from the company we were visiting to the next company upstream. Those claims were mostly wishful thinking. Managers are struggling to combine lean techniques into a coherent system. And in that heartland of global manufacturing, the automobile industry, it was soon impossible to find a manager anywhere who did not profess to be “getting lean.” We encountered scores of managers in industries as diverse as aerospace and construction who told us that they were adopting lean techniques-techniques for relentlessly and continuously eliminating waste from an operation. Instead, we discovered that we were battering down an open door. When we presented our evidence, we feared the industrial equivalent of an immune reaction, in which managers in other regions and industries would reject lean techniques as irrelevant to their circumstances or impossible to implement. The book summarized the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s study of the global automobile industry, which documented the great performance advantages that a best-in-class lean manufacturer such as Toyota had over typical mass producers in Western countries. Six years ago, we wrote, with Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World.
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