After making many millions of dollars leading you down the Lean tools path, tricking you into thinking that using Lean tools would make your company Lean, The Lean Enterprise Institute offers you the opportunity to spend $1500 per person to take a course where you will “learn why your lean effort is failing, and what to do differently.”
In the 25 years since the publication of the first Lean tools workbook Learning to See, the result has been far more Fake Lean than Real Lean and zero examples of Toyota-like Lean transformations as James Womack himself admitted in 2017 and again in 2022.
The Lean Enterprise Institute’s admission of Lean failure, after avoiding the subject for 27 years since its founding, and now offering this overpriced course, is BIG NEWS. But it is also SAD NEWS, because people — LEIs customers and others — have suffered unnecessarily for far too long. The obvious problem was avoided and it now becomes a business opportunity for LEI — and no doubt others who will copy LEIs latest move. (Note, I was there first, in 2022, with my $120 online course, Conquering Barriers).
Click here to spend just $25 to $125 to discover the REAL reasons why your Lean effort is failing, and what to do differently. Start with The Triumph of Classical Management Over Lean Management and work your way to the right. Learn the multivariate causes of Lean failure: status, rights, and privilege; irrationality; secular spirituality, aesthetics, preconceptions, and workmanship.
Or, if you prefer to get tricked again, waste money, and get wrong answers from people who have never formally analyzed the causes of Lean failures and who have done no in-depth studies of multivariate causality, then click here to spend $1500 to discover why your Lean effort is failing, and what to do differently.
LEI’s new online course purports to help you “Discover the five dimensions of the Lean Transformation Framework and learn how to use it to solve real organizational problems, ensuring successful transformations in your team, department, or organization.” Yet in 2015, I found that model to be weak. LEI’s model is shown below on the left, while my improved model is shown on the right.
The problem with LEIs course is that you can “use” the Lean Transformation Framework well and still fail, unaware of the forces that worked against you.
And, remarkably, soon after LEI posted the announcement of the “Understanding Lean Transformation” course on LinkedIn, 35 people gave it a “thumbs up,” as if LEI is an authority on the topic. They are not, and they also lack credibility to offer such a course.
Profiting off of one’s own errors (selling Lean tools) and neglecting a long-standing problem that caused two generations of Lean professionals a lot of pain is not “Respect for People.” Wow, can Lean get any more bizarre? Probably.
You are far better off abandoning Lean and focusing on what works, kaizen and TPS:
TPS and Kaizen Training in 1988, Part 1 of 4
TPS and Kaizen Training in 1988, Part 2 of 4
TPS and Kaizen Training in 1988, Part 3 of 4
TPS and Kaizen Training in 1988, Part 4 of 4