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## TL;DR
The original book about Lean in the western world, written in 1990 it provides an interesting peek into the past, the "japanese industrial invasion" and the world before the height of globalization, all through the lenses of car manufacturing. However, it's pretty outdated, which reduces it impact and direct applicability.

## Opinion
Lean was born on the japanese auto industry and it spread the world. Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with factories, so my interests lie on the use of Lean ideas to software development, where it has a lot of followers and I'm trying to have a better understanding of its basics.

The book describes the results of a 5-year research program during the 80's where they visited 90 factories around the world, comparing the performance of traditional mass production factories vs lean ones. The result is that lean manufacturers usually had better productivity, better quality, lower inventories and capital requirements, etc, the difference in the results was mostly explained by how "truly lean" a factory was, not everybody that called themselves lean or even where based in Japan, had good results.

One important thing I realized is that they split Lean in many parts (manufacturing, product design, supply chain, customer relations, management) and the one that is probably most applicable for software development is the part about product design, which is pretty close to the ideas around agile development. I'm sure I can find more insights by researching this specific aspect of Lean. The management part, however, was the least sophisticated, which is expected, since they were at the beginning of the process.

Some cool things the books mentions, but are mostly trivia:
* Since then they were considering the impacts of electric and self-driving cars
* No mention whatsoever to the Internet or the unification of communication, looks like it came as a surprise
* They missed the Asian Tiger phase, the fall of Communism, rampant globalization, NAFTA, EURO zone, the Japanese crisis, etc. It seems they were pretty optimistic
* The NUMMI factory closing wasn't in the cards back then, now resurrected by Tesla
* The authors never hint the possibility of expanding the use of Lean beyond manufacturing, but perhaps they assumed this was obvious
* They mention China twice in the book.

Much of the book predictions were dependent on macroeconomic trends and the regulatory situation of the time, I wonder if they would have changed their predictions or recommendations if they knew about the changes in world economics since that time. I guess they would. Also, they expected that Lean manufacturing would replace mass production by the end of the 20th century, I'm not sure how far we are from that on this day.

The productivity benefits of Lean are "obvious" but what should society do with workers that get displaced by the increased productivity and job cuts that these lean transformations entail? They have no suggestions beyond "the government needs to figure it out", which is pretty scary.

All in all, it's a very good historical perspective of manufacturing since Ford and cool insights into the original perspective on lean.

## Summary / Notes
* Lean manufacturing
* "It transfers the maximum number of tasks and responsibilities to those workers actually adding value to the car on the line, and it has in place a system for detecting defects that quickly traces every problem, once discovered, to it's ultimate cause."
* Employees divided into small groups
* Every member of the group is trained to perform all the tasks
* Quality isn't guaranteed at the end of the line, but instead it's built in on every step
* Employees have the authority to stop the line to correct problems as they are detected
* Problems aren't just fixed, instead the root causes are identified through the "5 whys" method and the fixes are applied to the source, avoiding their recurrence
* Rewards are focused on group and system performance instead of individual performance
* Employees are not super specialized, instead they are generalists trained to solve problems
* They have time to study and work on improvements to the process on regular intervals, Kaizen
* Waste elimination is critical, be it inefficient processes or too much inventory
* Inventory minimization is a constant effort, to reduce the amount of capital needed to make goods. Just-in-time is a part of it
* There are concerns that Lean work is even less fulfilling then regular mass production work, given the pressure for constant improvement and reduction of waste, generating a lot of stress. The counter-point is that they are empowered to control their work and environment
* Lean product development
* Lean products aren't developed in white rooms by engineers isolated from the rest of the company and the consumers, fighting for support from departments across the company. Instead they are developed by multidisciplinary teams lead by an empowered leader, the *shusa*, who has the mandate to design the product and all the necessary process changes and tools to guarantee its success, and they have access to a lot of data from consumers, partners and factory workers.
* The shusa has authority to do whatever it takes to make the project move, including poaching and overriding other departments
* The designers are assembled from talent across the company for the project and then disassembled
* Designers' performance is evaluated by the shusa and they have more impact on their careers than their normal managers
* The high risk decisions of the project are tackled at the beginning of the project, not at its end, similar to the problem solving on the factory floor
* Design is done together with suppliers, tool manufacturers and factory workers, instead of working in isolation and fixing integration problems after the project is done
* Lean design projects tend to have a shorter cycle and stabilization times
* Lean supply chain
* Lean supply chains are a cooperative process with suppliers, where the company has full knowledge of the numbers and capacity of the suppliers and vice-versa, the goal is to optimize the benefits and profits for both parties. Quite different from mass production supply chains, where the company and the suppliers are at odds all the time, hiding information and trying to maximize their profits disregarding the common benefits
* Lean suppliers are long term partnerships
* Suppliers are active participants on product and production design. Proprietary information is often shared.
* Price isn't the only guideline for choosing a partner, quality and overall relationship is more important
* Suppliers are expected to start with a high price and lower it as they get more volume, expertise and improve their own process
* It's common for company executives to work as "attachés" at the supplier. Equity exchanges are also common
* Just-in-time inventory is used to reduce capital costs and space requirements on both sides. This require good integration between company and suppliers
* The company usually has a tiered supply chain, they have few suppliers of big components (like chassis, drive train, etc) that in turn have their own supply chain of smaller components. This reduces the amount of direct relationships each company has to manage
* Lean customer feedback
* Lean companies try to maximize the life time value of customers (they didn't use this specific term, but that's what they meant). To do that they try to create a strong connection between brand and consumer, spending more time and effort building relationships
* Dealerships are owned or partly-owned by the company, instead of having multibrand dealers
* In the 80's the sales was door-to-door, with the salesperson creating a strong connection with the consumers. In the 90's this moved to a showroom model, but the importance on the relationship remained
* On dealerships the salespeople were organized in teams of non-specialists, just like in the factories. Performance bonuses were dependent on the group performance, not individual.
* To improve the relationship, the salespeople gathered a lot of data about customers, like the modern CRM systems, and interacted with them not in random intervals, but in moments where the customers might need their products
* Lean enterprise management
* A lot of the financial power of the Japanese Lean manufactures came from their *keiretsu* structure, at least from the authors perspective. In a keiretsu money comes from affiliated banks and companies that have equity interests in each other
* Careers in Japanese companies are based not on skill but on seniority. Moving between companies means starting from scratch, which enforces the "job for life" employment. The lack of this kind of stability on Western companies have impacts on their ability to actually implement Lean.
* Lean is ideal for companies that can produce their goods near their consumer markets, reinforcing supply chain benefits and just-in-time production based on customer demand, for this reason the authors suggest that companies should open independent but connect subsidiaries on their target markets, with constant executive exchange programs to reinforce culture and share lean knowledge.
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