Lean Enterprise Academy

"The Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc. (LEI), founded by James P. Womack in 1997, is a nonprofit education, publishing, research, and conference organization with an action plan. Compared with traditional "think" tanks, we are a "do" tank. We carefully develop hypotheses about lean thinking and experiment to see which approaches work best in the real world...We carry out our mission through value streams: Lean Education, Lean Learning Materials, the Lean Summit conferences, and our website lean.org. In addition, we exchange information across the world through the Lean Global Network, consisting of more than a dozen nonprofit organizations similar to LEI, sharing a common mission in different countries."

John Shook notes: "I sometimes wonder if we should bother making a distinction between management, and “lean management.” The late Peter Drucker is our foremost authority so far on “management,” and he tells us, “The essence of management is not techniques and procedures. The essence of management is to make knowledge productive.” Pretty good place to start, I’d say, and a definition that probably covers “lean management” as well as any management. But if lean thinking means a different approach to business, then it must also imply a different approach to managing by the people striving to operate in a “lean” way." 

Senior advisors
Accessed December 2013:


 * John Y. Shook - Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute
 * James P. Womack - Founder and Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute
 * Daniel T. Jones - Founder and Chairman, Lean Enterprise Academy
 * José R. Ferro - President, Lean Institute Brasil

Criticism

 * Steve Glennon, "Emperor's new clothes: bosses' pet management theories", The Socialist newspaper, 14 April 2010.

Contact
Web: http://www.lean.org

Related Sourcewatch

 * Toyota Production System - Toyota