A few years ago, lean thinking came to light. It sounded similar to what I had learned about the “pull” system. I wondered why we renamed cycle time reduction, or just in time (JIT), “lean.” Cycle time reduction was easy to understand and related to responsiveness to customer demands and waste reduction. What does “lean” mean?

Last year, I was asked to teach a class at one of the car manufacturers in Detroit. During the introduction, I was told, “So, you are going to teach us lean. Lean means mean. Lean means layoffs. We don’t want to learn lean. Do not teach us lean.” So there I was, hired to teach a class students didn’t want to learn. Something wasn’t right. A week later I received a call from Ohio to implement lean at a company there. The lean leader said, “We have been improving a lot, we have a new chief operating officer and his first question is about headcount reduction due to lean implementation.” I concluded then that there were three strikes against lean: It’s a renamed JIT, it’s disliked by employees and it has negative measures of success.

About a month ago, I was listening to a lean sensei. He gave a great presentation to 40 executives about lean and its promise for U.S. corporations. As I heard again that lean is based on Toyota’s production system (TPS), I wondered why Toyota didn’t name its TPS lean, or why other companies took TPS and called it lean.

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