The Psychology of Lean Production

As one of the originators of the term “ lean production” (although certainly not of the ideas behind the name, which I and my colleagues simply synthesised from the practices of a number of Japanese e rms led by Toyota), it is a pleasure to observe the spread of interest in this concept to a range of academic disciplines including applied psychology. Ironically, the main point of my commentary will be that the analysis of lean production in comparison with the previous dominant industrial paradigm of mass production is perhaps weakest in the area of . . . applied psychology! However, before pursuing this point let me briee y summarise my view of the current degree of adoption of lean production. At the time we were conducting our research at MIT in the late 1980s, we could e nd practically no examples in Western companies in which all of the key elements of lean production— in the primary work team, in overall organisation of physical production, in the product design team, in the method of dealing with suppliers, and in the method of dealing with customers— were in place. Knowing the long history of the diffusion of mass production from the USA to both Japan and Europe and the many wrong steps along the path, our greatest concern was that the most useful aspects of Japanese innovations would be ignored or rejected by managers, union leaders, and employees in Western e rms. In 1995, the situation is much changed and our worst fears have not come to pass. Indeed, in researching a new book, which I and my colleague Professor Daniel Jones are just completing, we found many examples of the