Leaders lead. Or do they? There is not always a cause-and-effect relationship between leadership actions and follower behavior. Not all leaders succeed at pulling people along in the same direction. If a leader needs to drive people in a direction, keeping the fringes from straying too far from the herd like so many cattle on the trail from Oklahoma to Chicago, is he really leading?

There are a series of neat binary choices that define lean-not lean in reference to mindsets, behaviors, and operating conditions: waste vs. value, batch vs. flow, short-term vs. long-term, hide vs. expose, who vs. why, push vs. pull. These and others guiding principles help provide “true north” on the compass of continuous improvement. They apply as well to lean leadership as they do to designing discrete elements of lean operations.

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