I’m no expert in Lean. But from what little I know, it must be the best kept secret in wealth creation today.

Few people nowadays dispute the power and success of the Toyota Production System. But most still see it as being unique to a particular company’s corporate culture or industrial circumstances. “Lean is fantastic … for them,” people say. “But not for us”.

Yet the principles of Lean are pretty much universal because they are about ‘the secrets’ of efficient, effective work: what work people do, and how well they work together. So Lean principles apply as much to services as to manufacturing, as much to the public sector as the private sector, as much to dealing with customers as to making things. For a recent exploration of how Lean principles apply to the UK’s National Health Service for example, go to http://www.leanuk.org/pages/lean_healthcare.htm#Articles.

In fact, there is nothing secret about the secrets of Lean. They’re pretty obvious once you stop to think about them. Here are some examples:

• Define value solely from the perspective of the customer, both external and internal, and eliminate everything else as waste. (This means not defining value according to other, internally generated perspectives, such as unit cost, margin, economic order quantity etc. It goes much further than you might think.)
• Focus on actual work done, not proxies such as information about work done (e.g. production planning or other software), financials, organisation charts and reporting lines etc. Get the work right, and organise everything else around getting the work right.
• Focus on end-to-end processes, not just isolated parts of these processes. Otherwise, your attempts to improve one part of the process will simply create even bigger problems somewhere else along the line.
• Tackle the root cause of problems, not just their symptoms. (Again, this goes much further than you might think. Here’s just one example. Part of this ‘root cause’ approach is a determination to get things right first time. One of the implications of this is that often ‘the best service is no service’: because customers only need ‘service’ if something goes wrong …)
• Rely on the ingenuity of staff to solve problems; make them expert problem solvers. (Again, this goes much further than you might think. Many organisations do their best to eliminate the human from the way they work, because human beings are error prone and inefficient compared to machines. So they reduce peoples’ role to mere appendages of machines both literally (in terms of merely ‘minding’ the machine) and metaphorically (in terms of being slaves to the organisational machine). Lean makes the ‘people element’ more important, not less, because it regards people as the main source of creativity and problem solving. Culture-wise this leads you in a completely different direction. It is not the job of the worker to help the organisation do its job. It is the job of the organisation to help the worker do his job. Think about it!)

The net effect of all these things (and more) combined, is that the organisation ends up being to do much more, in less time, using less resources. From a narrow competitive perspective that’s a huge advantage. Just look at constrasting fortunes of Toyota vs Ford and GM in the US right now.

But there’s more. Lean helps create a continuously improving win-win system: one which benefits customers, staff and the organisation itself.

It’s not a panacea: there’s stuff it doesn’t address and which needs to be addressed. But it’s almost certainly part of the solution, if not the whole solution to the challenge of improved wealth creation.

There is plenty of excellent stuff that’s already been written about Lean production. The best starting point is www.leanuk.org or www.lean.org.

The superiority of the Lean approach has been decisively ‘proved’ in the sphere of production. But only recently are these same principles being applied to services, both public and private, and to customer service in particular. This is a huge – and new – opportunity that just has to be worth exploring.