The book that started the spread of the lean system and changed management worldwide turns 30
If the lean system is today a management model adopted and respected in much of the world, by organizations from many sectors, from factories to hospitals, from banks to retail chains, one of the things responsible for this turns three decades old this year.
It is the publication of the book “The Machine That Changed the World”, released in the US on October 10, 1990, written by James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos, and today a worldwide best-seller.
The work made public the results of one of the largest studies ever carried out on the automotive industry worldwide, conducted in the 1980s by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in the US.
It was a research project that investigated, for about five years, 90 automotive companies in 15 countries, involved dozens of researchers and cost 5 million dollars, funded with the support of 36 organizations.
It was in this study that the researchers realized that Toyota had developed over decades, starting in post-World War II Japan, a new management model, substantially different from the previous ones. In this context, rich in history, concepts, data and facts, the book described and compared the evolution of industrial models, based on mass management, with the then new production model.
It presented, for the first time, this new management system, explaining why it is different from the previous ones and how it demonstrably generates superior results. And it “christened” the new model, for the first time, as the “lean” system, which in Portuguese means “enxuto”, to sum up the fact that this management was able to make products of higher quality than those of mass production using less than half the resources.
In the automotive context, it explained the main elements of the new model and how it came to generate impressive results, carrying out activities in continuous flow, eliminating waste and generating incomparably higher quality and productivity.
The principles revealed, relating to the production environment, are so powerful at generating competitiveness that many people, on a first reading, do not notice other equally important elements present in that research.
In a pioneering way even at that time, it detailed, for example, the management of product development, of the supply chain and of the relationship with customers from a lean perspective – fundamental chapters for understanding the system as a whole.
The Brazilian edition had an additional chapter, “Lean production in Brazil”, written by professor José Roberto Ferro, the only Brazilian researcher to work on the MIT research, who afterwards founded the Lean Institute Brasil. It was the second organization of its kind to appear in the world (the first was the US one, founded by Womack, co-author of the book), with the aim of disseminating the practice of lean management – today, it is part of a network of 30 institutes in 30 countries and 5 continents.
Thus, the book became the first great disseminator of the until then unknown lean management model. As a result, it impacted practically all automakers, which came to see the system as a standard to be followed, Influenced the auto parts sector and, later, reached companies in the most varied sectors.
And it paved the way for other fundamental works. For example, “Lean Thinking”, also by Womack and Jones, broadened the term “lean production”, used in the previous book, to “lean thinking”, emphasizing the cultural changes the system brings and its applicability to all kinds of companies, areas and organizational sectors.
In doing so, it helped lean management become what it is today: a model of operational excellence adopted, at various levels and in various forms, in practically all large corporations in much of the world and in many medium-sized and even small companies.
Today there are thousands, all over the world, of practical application cases, books, articles, consultancies and events on the subject, characterizing what can be called the “lean movement”, which seeks to improve organizations, serve customers better and have a positive impact on society and on people's quality of life.
Undoubtedly, this was no small feat for a single book, whose merits go beyond the historical bibliographic aspect. Few works have achieved the impact that “The Machine That Changed the World” brought, revolutionizing several management concepts.
And this impact keeps expanding, inspiring more and more people and organizations with constant discoveries of new ways of applying lean principles to solve problems in increasingly diverse situations.
