Lean has a longer and more color ful history than most of us think, with

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By Rick Pay

Lean has a longer and more color-

ful history than most of us think, with 

many Lean concepts predating Womack 

and Jones’s books on the subject. 

In fact, according to my research, 

many of the Lean concepts have been 

around for more than 2,500 years, and 

date back to ancient China. 

In the 20th century, Henry Ford 

discussed ideas that we’d now describe 

as Lean, such as waste, teams, devel-

oping the people in his plants, and 

more. In fact, Ford’s work was one of 

the sources (along with U.S. supermar-

kets and Japanese samurai) that Toyota 

looked to when they developed their 

Toyota Production System.

Some 75 percent of U.S. com-

panies are engaged in some form of 

Lean implementation, but according to 

studies by MIT, Stanford, Booze Allen 

Hamilton and McKinsey and Co., 70 

percent of them fail to achieve signifi-

cant results. 

The timeline of a Lean initiative 

closely mirrors the S-curve of a prod-

uct life cycle — there’s development, 

growth, maturation and decline. In 

Lean, this cycle takes about five years, 

and many companies find that after 

this period they’re right back where 

they started.