Since Daniel Jones and James Womack published “The Machine That Changed the World” in 1990, the concept of lean production has steadily gained traction in a wide range of organizations. Lean management stems from waste-killing concepts developed by Toyota during the mid-20^th century. The meteoric success of Toyota as an automotive manufacturer led organizations as diverse as Parker Hannifin, Intel and Nike to adopt its ideas.

Broadly speaking, lean thinking involves defining and systematically eliminating multiple types of waste from a production system. A famous story told in lean circles, for example, says that a major government agency adopting lean strictly defined the location of supplies in its offices, so staff did not waste valuable daily minutes searching for scissors or a stapler. Few managers and executives could argue with eliminating waste, even if it means minutes a day.

However, in the nearly three decades since lean entered public consciousness, lean implementations changed in ways that distinguish and sometimes alienate it from its roots at Toyota. Below are two takeaways about lean thinking in 2019.

In the end, it is people that matter

One key to lean manufacturing is just-in-time production, which eliminates waste by keeping low product and material stock and removing barriers that cause production delays. Considering these concepts brings up images of a Henry Ford-esque production line rapidly producing widgets or some other generic part.

Figure 1: While lean methodology places great importance on predictable, efficient work, implementations sometimes forget the people who perform it.What many modern lean implementations leave out is the people doing the work. Toyota’s original system emphasized cost reduction: discovering the origin of wasteful activities and eliminating the cause. But many modern implementations redirect the focus to simple cost-cutting. The former activity reduces worker stress and frees up time for value-building activities, while the latter increases stress and forces workers to do more with less. For this reason, critics of modern lean organizations often cite that managers who claim to run lean are simply paying lip service to a trendy management style while running their organizations on a shoestring budget.

Toyota’s original system emphasized people: respect for workers and their personal and professional goals, mutual trust, responsibility and shared opportunities for development. The technical aspects of lean thinking only work when an organization’s people are considered along with them.

Is lean just good (or bad) management?

Since its inception, commentators in a number of industries have compared lean thinking to existing management strategies and wondered how it differs.

Lean’s relationship to Taylorism – a management style with an obsessive focus on productivity and cost reduction, often at the worker’s expense – is particularly interesting. The interplay between the two came to a head in January 2016, when the New England Journal of Medicine published an article highly critical of lean thinking, equating it to a 21^st century iteration of Taylorism and blaming it for the glut of overworked doctors in hospitals and clinics. The article elicited several responses from the Lean Enterprise Institute, including one from Michael Ballé teasing apart the differences between the two methods.

According to Ballé, Taylorism promotes workers executing jobs defined by experts with less stake in the actual work, payment for performance and an obsessive and often unnecessary focus on increasing output. Ballé believes these attributes have had a disastrous effect on employee morale and corporate culture throughout the 20^th century.

On the contrary, Ballé said Toyota’s lean system focuses on improving quality over a variety of designs, maintaining consistent production while diversifying product lines, and keeping employee morale and happiness consistent at all times. In other words, while lean shares Taylorism’s focus on productivity, its similarities largely end there.

Interestingly, an October 22 Industry Week article is critical of lean for a different reason: that it is simply good management practices couched in mystical language. Author Dan Markovitz, who himself is a lean consultant, points out that many lean principles like “gemba” – the importance of executives observing and understanding how production work is done – were practiced by business leaders as diverse as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford and Bill Gates long before lean thinking became a management trend.

Like most seminal ideas, lean thinking has evolved and spread in various directions. Some implementations have led to wildly successful businesses, while others led to negative culture shifts. Business owners and manufacturers must remember a few core tenets to truly benefit from lean: start with the people, understand the value of small changes and consider implementing lean to make good businesses better, not necessarily to solve a production crisis or save a sinking organization.