Management Articles by Jim Womack

• A Lean Walk Through History   view details
  "Once you are sensitized to the depth of lean history, along with its many advances and setbacks, it's easy to begin filling in some of the other milestones: By 1765, French general Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauval had grasped the significance of standardized designs and interchangeable parts to facilitate battlefield repairs. (Actually doing this cost-effectively in practice was another matter and required another 125 years.)"

• Going Lean in Health Care   view details
  "Lean principles hold the promise of reducing or eliminating wasted time, money, and energy in health care, creating a system that is efficient, effective, and truly responsive to the needs of patients ? the 'customers' at the heart of it all."

• The Dramatic Spread of Lean Thinking   view details
  "I am delighted with the spread of lean thinking far beyond the factory and far beyond the high-wage economies to every corner of the world and to every value-creating activity."

• Lean Manufacturing Visionary Jim Womack On Frontiers Of Lean Thinking   view details
  "by bonus systems motivating sales staff to make the month or make the quarter and producing a wave of orders at the end of the reporting period. A better approach to these problems is to revamp the bonuses so they are rolling averages rather that don't e

• Lean Consumption   view details
  "Lean production transformed manufacturing. Now it?s time to apply lean thinking to the processes of consumption. By minimizing customers? time and effort and delivering exactly what they want when and where they want it, companies can reap huge benefi

• Teaching the Big Box New Tricks   view details
  "The consequence, in terms of performance, is remarkable. Total "touches" on the product (each of which involves costly human effort) have been reduced from 150 to 50. The total throughput time, from the filling line at the supplier to the customer leavin

• From Lean Tools to Lean Management   view details
  "Lean tools are great. We all need to master and deploy them, and our efforts of the last 15 years to do so are not wasted. But just as a carpenter needs a vision of what to build in order to get the full benefit of a hammer, we need a clear vision of our

• Jim Womack podcast on Lean in China   view details
  Jim Womack talks about the state of lean manufacturing in China on the lean blog.

• Machine Revisited   view details
  Podcast of Mark Graban interviewing Jim Womack; discussing the reissue of Machine that Changed the World: "the biggest disappointment... was to have people tell me it was a g

• Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose   view details
  "Toyotas great risk, the way it can lose, is that its new managers and the managers in its new suppliers will revert to the old, mass-production mentality of the companies or schools they have come from. If this happens, Toyotas management performance w

• State of the Auto World   view details
  Podcast interview by Mark Graban. "G.E. has been a 'make the numbers' company as opposed to a 'fix the company' company, says Jim. But now GE is saying they have to be like Toyota... 'is there anything beyond Six Sigma or even to Six Sigma?'"

• From lean tools to lean management   view details
  "Teach all managers to ask questions about their value streams (rather than giving answers and orders from higher levels). Turn these questions into experiments using Plan-Do-Check-Act. Only management by science through constant experimentation to answe

• Thought Leaders -- Lean On Me   view details
  "Toyota has a supplier management system that is still the best-in-class, and a good part of Toyota's recent quality issue has been bringing in a whole bunch of non-Toyota traditional suppliers and trying to teach them the Toyota Management System, and th

• Cost Cutting is Much Different than Waste Removal   view details
  "As the lean transformation proceeds, convert physical inventories into cash, but keep an inventory of cash to buffer the firm during the down cycle. From the standpoint of modern financial thinking, this seems sub-optimal. Shouldn't all of the freed-up c

• Jim Womack on How Toyota Rose and Fell   view details
  "He argued that rapid expansion was leaving Toyota short of experienced managers, and it would fail if they reverted to modern-management mentality and didn't learn lean principles. If that happens, 'Toyota will become just another company.'"

• Respect for People   view details
  "the manager isn’t a morale booster, always saying, 'Great job!' Instead the manager challenges the employees every step of the way, asking for more thought, more facts, and more discussion, when the employees just want to implement their favored solution. Over time I've come to realize that this problem solving process is actually the highest form of respect."