Lean Leadership is written for a very specific but large audience. The entire business world is aggressively pursing “lean” in all of its manifestations. Lean manufacturing, lean operations, lean service and so on are becoming the mantra of competition squeezed business. Lean Leadership addresses this audience in a manner that no other book on the market matches. Lean Leadership provides senior managers and leaders with an in-depth and broad exposure to the fundamental background knowledge and implementation methods that drive all enterprises that are successful over the long-term. It has been the author's experience, as both an executive and a consultant, that senior managers are willing and eager to do all that is required of them to lead their portion of an organization to success. Difficulties arise not because senior managers lack energy, but because they don't always fully understand how and why many required actions are necessary. The mechanics of lean systems (kaizen, pull systems, flexible cells, and so on) are simple in concept and thus appear easy to implement. Yet, few organizations are able to implement "lean" the first time they try. The most important implementation insights involve overcoming resistance, establishing a common set of tools and approaches that everyone uses, and dealing with implementation issues every day, hands-on, at the work group level. Lean Leadership provides a comprehensive overview of the individual, group and organization mechanisms that energize a lean organization and provides all of the tools and methodologies needed to get started on a successful lean implementation.

Average Customer Review: ( 3 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.

Lareau correctly argues that for any business to successfully integrate a Lean program into its structure, it needs to develop and sustain overwhelming employee acceptance and involvement in the program. Unfortunately, Lareau's psychological foundations for his theories on human motivations are outdated. Much has been revealed in the field of psychology in the past 15-20 years with which Lareau clearly needs to acquaint himself.

Lareau makes repetitive attempts to motivate the reader to his way of thinking through tiresome war characterization analogies and often unfounded attacks to minimize or discredit past business improvement programs and their proponents in favor of his own.

He attempts to develop and reinforce the belief that Lean requires such levels of training and business restructuring, that the reader must conclude that to successfully implement and sustain Lean, they must invest heavily and for a lengthy duration, in an outside Lean consultant. His books are essentially marketing tools for his own consultant firm.

Incidentally, this book lacks both an index and a bibliography. Perhaps Lareau finds that citing his sources and crediting the specific works of others are an unnecessary inconvenience.

A Must-read for ManagementJun 14, 2008
By Subrata Das
The author makes one absolutely great point -- the use of external consultants. The over hundred comapanies that I have seen the insides of, every one of them has made an initial failed attempt to implement Lean without an external consultant as all of these companies felt that it should be simple. Most of the wiser ones, the ones that stayed in business, have then gone on to hire an external consultant to develop a Lean roadmap and follow that roadmap, and only then did they realize that Lean implementation was "deceptively" simple. Being an external consultant myself in my past life [I now work for just a single company] and having worked with many of them, I know that it is almost impossible for an insider to have the vision and the experience of failure that is needed to develop and follow a Lean roadmap for its employer. An outside consultant does not necessarily tell you what to do [most of it you would know yourself], but he or she will tell you what NOT to do and steer you away from making million dollar mistakes, if you would listen. I have noticed that most management simply do not get the simple fact that Lean implentation has very little to do with "furnitue" movement on the factory floor, which any insider with a little bit of industrial engineering knowledge can do,