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".
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