Last week, I attended a webinar featuring James Womack and John Shook of the Lean Enterprise Institute. They are among the best thought leaders in lean management. They share a wealth of observations about the crucial role that leadership plays in seeing lean come into an organization. There are many great points from Toyota and other real world situations.

One point they dwell on is how important it is to engage middle management in the transition process. They are the ones who will be doing the most work and who will be most affected. They also talk a lot about the importance for management of asking intelligent questions and establishing an environment in which there is both leadership and collaboration. We want to avoid both the autocrat and the hands-off manager.

The presentation and podcast are both available on http://www.lean.org/ in their training section.

Note: this does not represent an endorsement by Net Objectives, but I think this was great stuff!

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