Brief history of Lean
Lean is usually told as a Japanese success story. The real history is older, more international and more useful to anyone running a warehouse today. Ask most people where Lean comes from and you'll hear one word: Toyota. That's true, but it's only the last chapter. The ideas at the heart of Lean, such as flow, standard work, building quality in and producing only what's needed, have been rediscovered again and again over two thousand years. Toyota's achievement was to borrow the best of them, add a few of its own, and weave them into one system that worked. Knowing that history isn't just trivia. It explains why Lean works, why copying the tools rarely does, and what a logistics operation in Asia can take from it today. How Lean conquered the world For most of the 20th century, the West saw Japanese manufacturing as cheap imitation. That changed in the 1970s and 1980s. When the 1973 oil crisis hit, Toyota is widely credited with recovering faster tha...