Lean : What's in a name ?

Recently I attended a Lean Symposium. Contrary to many ( more expensive ) lean conferences, this conference attracted a diverse group of participants. E.g. shopfloor associates, HR professionals, consultants, entrepreneurs.

The power and pitfall of the terminology "lean" is that it attracts a wide range of people with different backgrounds and agenda's. What struck me is that many people have a very different understanding about lean. During the first general session, a discussion erupted on " the definition of lean ". Here are some examples :

Lean tooling in a Six Sigma program context : A presenter of a company using LSS, stressed that "lean" in no way was related to "developping people to their potential".

Only bottum up - power to the shopfloor : "We talk here about how management should implement lean, but management is overhead. Lean should start from continuous improvement on the shop flow"

The production lead time perspective : The essence of lean is reducting the lead time from customer order to delivery.

Branding : Another startling example is one of an entrepreneur in HR services: "Lean is just common sense. For me it's just adding another label for my services to address a new customer segment"

Form this confusion of tongues I learned, that to properly reflect my school of thought, I should use the definition "Lean, based on the Toyota Way" instead of just "Lean".

Towards Lean

Lean, based on the Toyota Way, is the first truely integrated and holistic management system I have encountered. I'm on a journey of continuous learning and improvement, in search of understanding and practicing lean. In my belief, a company or a person never achieves the state of "Lean" or perfection. Hence we will always remain moving "Towards" Lean.

This informal Blog will act as my training notebook; containing both lessons learned and making my insights explicit.

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Towards : 1] in the direction of, 2] in relation to, 3] as a contribution to