Book Notes #45: This Is Lean by Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström

Title: This is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox
Author: Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström
Year: 2012
Pages: 168

Have you ever felt like everything around you is moving, but nothing’s really getting done? Like the people are busy, the machines are humming, but the customer is still waiting?

That’s the world This Is Lean invites us to explore—and rethink. It’s not a book filled with corporate jargon or checklists. It’s a guide to seeing work differently.

According to This Is Lean, lean is an operations strategy focused on maximizing flow efficiency—how smoothly and quickly value moves to the customer—rather than just keeping resources busy.

It’s not about doing more with less, but about doing the right things in the right way, with minimal interruption, waiting, or unnecessary work.

Lean is a mindset and a continuous journey of improvement, built on clear values and principles, not just a set of tools or practices.

As a result, I gave this book a rating of 8.5/10.

For me, a book with a note 10 is one I consider reading again every year. Among the books I rank with 10, for example, are How to Win Friends and Influence People and Factfulness.

3 Reasons to Read This is Lean

Book Overview

What if everything we thought we knew about efficiency was wrong?

That’s the question This Is Lean forces us to confront—and not with flashy jargon or buzzwords, but through simple stories, clear logic, and a deeply human lens.

It starts with something surprisingly relatable: the journey of a woman named Alison through a complex healthcare system.

She visits multiple clinics, waits endlessly, and barely spends any time actually receiving care. The total process takes over 1,000 hours—yet the actual treatment only takes two. And she’s not alone.

This one story does what charts and frameworks often fail to do. It makes inefficiency feel real. Painfully real. Because we’ve all been Alison—stuck in some queue, passed between departments, waiting for something that should’ve been simple.

And that’s exactly the point.

The authors use her story to introduce a concept that turns the traditional idea of efficiency upside down.

Most organizations, they argue, are obsessed with keeping resources—people, machines, time—fully utilized. That’s what they call resource efficiency.

But what gets overlooked is the person moving through the system: the customer, the patient, the flow unit. What really matters is flow efficiency—how smoothly and quickly that person receives value.

When we focus too much on the first, we often kill the second.

From there, the book peels back layers of misunderstanding that have accumulated around the word “lean.”

What started as Toyota’s homegrown solution to post-war scarcity has turned into a global buzzword—applied to everything from software to healthcare to personal productivity. Along the way, it’s been watered down, misinterpreted, and often misused.

People grab the tools—Kanban boards, daily stand-ups, 5S—and forget the purpose behind them.

That’s where this book shines. Instead of handing out another checklist, it gives us something better: a way to think.

Through vivid examples and quietly powerful metaphors (like filming a flow unit’s journey or playing soccer in a tent), the authors reveal what lean is really about. It’s not about moving faster—it’s about making time count.

Not just keeping people busy, but helping them deliver value, without interruption, delay, or unnecessary detours.

One of the most eye-opening sections introduces the “Efficiency Matrix”—a simple yet revealing model that maps organizations based on how they balance flow and resource efficiency.

It shows that many companies who think they’re efficient are actually stuck in what the authors call the “efficiency paradox”: in their attempt to be busy, they create more waiting, more restarts, more chaos.

The system feels productive, but the customer experience suffers—and internal work piles up in the form of rework, stress, and missed opportunities.

Some of the key concepts include:

Flow Efficiency: This is the core idea of the book. Flow efficiency is all about how quickly and smoothly a customer’s need is fulfilled—measured by the time it takes from the moment a need is identified to the moment it’s satisfied. It shifts the focus from internal productivity to external value delivery. Rather than asking, “Are our people busy?” it asks, “How fast is the customer getting what they need?” It’s about reducing waiting, handovers, and friction in the process.

Resource Efficiency: The traditional way of working, resource efficiency is centered on making sure every resource—people, machines, systems—is constantly in use. It’s the model most companies default to: full schedules, tight capacity, no downtime. But the book argues that this kind of busyness often creates invisible waste, slows things down, and hurts the customer experience. It may look productive, but it’s often just motion without real progress.

The Efficiency Paradox: Here’s where it gets interesting: trying too hard to be resource efficient can actually make you less efficient overall. This is the efficiency paradox. When everyone is always busy and systems run at full capacity, there’s no room for variation or flexibility—so things clog, queue, or break. You create more delays, rework, and complexity just to keep people busy. The paradox is that less busy can often mean more productive.

Throughput Time: This is the total time a flow unit (like a product or a customer request) spends in the process. The book constantly brings us back to this metric because it captures what the customer experiences. Even if someone spends just five minutes with a doctor, they might have waited weeks to get there. Throughput time includes all that waiting and reflects the actual service quality from the customer’s point of view.

Little’s Law: One of the key pieces of math in the book, Little’s Law explains how throughput time, the number of items in a process, and the speed of work are all connected. It shows that if you want to reduce throughput time, you either need to process things faster or keep fewer items in the system. It’s a simple equation with big consequences for how we manage flow.

The Law of Bottlenecks: Bottlenecks are the parts of a process that slow everything down—and every process has at least one. This law explains that the slowest step in a process controls the pace of the entire system. You can’t improve flow unless you identify and improve the bottleneck. Otherwise, you’re just optimizing around a constraint, which doesn’t actually help.

The Effect of Variation: Variation—both in demand and in how work gets done—makes everything more difficult. It leads to delays, mistakes, and unpredictable flow. The more variation you face, the harder it is to maintain both flow and resource efficiency. This is why systems that look perfect on paper can fall apart in reality—because people and environments aren’t predictable.

Superfluous Work: This is the hidden enemy in most organizations: work that exists only because the system is inefficient. When flow is poor, people create extra reports, new handovers, backup plans, and endless coordination meetings just to cope. It’s work that wouldn’t exist in a smoother system. The book calls this out as one of the biggest sources of waste—because it drains energy without adding value.

The Efficiency Matrix: A major framework in the book, the efficiency matrix plots organizations based on their flow efficiency and resource efficiency. Most companies sit in “efficient islands,” where departments are busy but disconnected. The goal is to move toward the “efficient ocean,” where flow is prioritized and waste is reduced. The perfect state—high in both—is theoretically possible but limited by real-world variation.

Lean as an Operations Strategy: Instead of seeing lean as a set of tools, the book redefines it as a way to operate. Lean is a strategy—a decision to prioritize flow efficiency and continually improve how value is delivered. It’s not something you install. It’s something you practice, refine, and live by. And it doesn’t look the same in every organization, because every context is different.

The Pyramid of Realization: Inspired by a story from Toyota, this concept explains how lean systems are built from the top down: starting with values, followed by principles, then methods, and finally tools and activities. Most companies jump straight to the tools, but the real power lies in aligning actions with deeper beliefs and thinking. It’s a reminder that lean is built on purpose—not just process.

Jidoka and Just-in-Time: These are the two central principles in Toyota’s system. Jidoka is about building quality and visibility into every step—so problems are spotted and fixed immediately. Just-in-time is about producing exactly what’s needed, when it’s needed, in the right amount—no more, no less. Together, they create systems that are responsive, predictable, and smooth.

Lean Is a Journey, Not a Destination: The book closes with a powerful idea: lean is not a label you earn or a project you complete. It’s a mindset of continuous improvement. You’re not lean—you’re becoming lean. And the real test isn’t whether your processes look good today, but whether they’ll be better tomorrow. It’s about learning how to fish, not just catching one.

But perhaps the most important idea in the entire book comes at the very end, through the story of a quiet, legendary Toyota manager named Ooba-san.

Lean isn’t a state.

It’s not something you achieve and check off.

It’s a dynamic journey, a commitment to continuously improve how value flows to your customers.

It’s not about catching the big fish—it’s about learning how to fish, again and again.

This Is Lean doesn’t just explain a better way to work—it gives you a new lens for seeing how things actually operate.

It challenges your assumptions, simplifies the complex, and—most importantly—shows that true efficiency is deeply human.

Not everything that looks lean is lean.

But when you understand the difference, it changes how you lead, build, and serve—forever.

Chapter by Chapter

Chapter 1 – From Resource Focus to Customer Focus

The book opens with two contrasting stories—Alison and Sarah—both undergoing breast cancer diagnostics.

Alison thought she had cancer.
She found a lump in her breast and did everything right.
She called her doctor.
Got an appointment the same day.
Got referred to a specialist.
Then the system took over.

She waited 10 days for the clinic to call.
Waited another week for the scan.
Waited again for the surgeon.
Waited again for the biopsy.
Then waited again for the results.
42 days passed.

Now meet Sarah.
Same fear.
Same kind of lump.
But she heard about a one-stop breast clinic.
She went in on a Thursday.
By Thursday evening, she’d had her exam, mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy—and a diagnosis.

Same outcome.
Same quality of care.
But one journey took 2 hours.
The other took 1,008 hours.

Alison’s journey was efficient for the system.
Sarah’s journey was efficient for the consumer.

Their experiences set the stage for understanding the core difference between two major ways of thinking about efficiency: resource efficiency and flow efficiency.

Alison’s Experience: A Resource-Efficient System

Alison’s journey through the healthcare system was long, fragmented, and stressful.

She had to visit multiple departments—her local doctor, breast clinic, X-ray, and cytology—making five trips in total. Each step was handled by a different specialist, and Alison had to coordinate it all herself.

The actual diagnostic tests took very little time, but the process dragged on for forty-two days. Most of her time was spent waiting, not being treated.

This setup, while aiming to use hospital resources (like machines and doctors) efficiently, left the patient navigating a complex, slow system.

What is Resource Efficiency?

This traditional approach to efficiency is all about maximizing the use of resources—people, machines, buildings. It’s the idea that if you’ve paid for a doctor or a machine, they should be busy as much as possible.

For over two centuries, organizations have been built this way, dividing work into smaller tasks and focusing on doing each part as cheaply and productively as possible.

From an economic standpoint, this makes sense. If you don’t fully use what you’ve paid for, you’re missing out—an idea known as opportunity cost.

Sarah’s Experience: A Flow-Efficient System

Sarah’s diagnosis, in contrast, was done in a single visit. All the specialists were under one roof, working as a multifunctional team.

She spent just a couple of hours at the clinic and got her results the same day. This approach focused on her as the patient—the unit flowing through the system—rather than the resources. It respected her time, reduced stress, and delivered fast results.

What is Flow Efficiency?

Flow efficiency flips the traditional model. Instead of focusing on how busy the resources are, it asks: how well are we meeting the needs of the person or item moving through the system?

In this case, that person is the patient. Flow efficiency measures how much of the total time is actually spent adding value from the customer’s perspective.

A Shocking Comparison

Alison’s process took 1,008 hours (42 days), but only 2 hours were value-adding. That’s a flow efficiency of just 0.2%. Sarah’s process took 2 hours total, with 80 minutes adding value—67% flow efficiency.

This isn’t just a math problem. It’s about human experience. Alison spent over a month not knowing if she had cancer. Sarah knew within hours. The time saved didn’t just reduce costs—it reduced suffering.

Can We Have Both?

The natural question is: why don’t we just aim for both resource and flow efficiency? The reality is, that’s very hard to do.

High resource efficiency often comes at the cost of poor flow (as seen in Alison’s case), and optimizing for flow may mean resources sit idle at times.

This chapter makes the case that we need to rethink how we define and pursue efficiency. It introduces a powerful insight: improving the experience and outcome for the “flow unit” (the customer, the patient, the item) may require us to stop obsessing over keeping every resource constantly busy. And that’s a big mindset shift.

Chapter 2 – Processes Are Central to Flow Efficiency

If Chapter 1 introduced us to the contrast between resource efficiency and flow efficiency, this chapter lays the foundation for truly understanding how flow efficiency is built—and that starts with one key word: processes.

Filming Alison’s Journey

The chapter opens with a creative metaphor: imagine placing a film camera on Alison’s shoulder as she goes through her diagnostic journey. This camera captures everything she experiences—from doctor visits to long waits at home.

Some of those “clips” show moments where she’s receiving real value (like her mammogram), while others show dead time (like waiting for test results or commuting).

Flow efficiency, the authors argue, is about cutting the non-value-adding clips and stitching together only the meaningful moments into a short, effective “action movie.”

Defining Processes from the Flow Unit’s Perspective

A key shift the book insists on is this: always define processes from the flow unit’s perspective—not the organization’s. In Alison’s case, she is the flow unit.

It’s about her journey, not the hospital’s schedule. A process is simply a sequence of activities that move something forward. That “something”—the flow unit—could be a material (like car parts), information (like a permit application), or people (like Alison or a theme park guest).

Most organizations mistakenly put the camera on their resources instead of the person or object moving through the system. But to understand and improve flow, you have to follow the unit, not the system.

The Subtle Difference in Dependence

Here’s a fascinating idea: the real difference between resource and flow efficiency lies in who adapts to whom. In resource efficiency, the customer adapts to the system—it’s all about keeping the machines or people (resources) busy.

In flow efficiency, the system adapts to the customer—ensuring their journey flows smoothly. One prioritizes busy doctors; the other prioritizes patients getting answers fast.

It’s not just a philosophical difference—it’s a structural one. Do we “attach work to people” or “attach people to work”? That subtle shift changes everything.

Throughput Time and System Boundaries

Another important concept is throughput time—the total time it takes for a flow unit to go through the entire process. But this measurement only makes sense if we know where the process starts and ends. The kicker? We choose those boundaries ourselves.

For instance, does Alison’s process begin when she first felt a lump, when she called the doctor, or when she walked into the clinic? The answer depends on how we draw the system’s boundaries. This framing is powerful because it reveals opportunities for innovation.

Virgin Atlantic, for example, redefined their process to start from the moment a business traveler left their office—not just airport check-in—and offered a premium motorbike pick-up service to beat London traffic. Seeing the whole customer journey created new value.

Value-Adding vs. Non-Value-Adding Activities

At the heart of flow efficiency is the question: Which activities actually create value for the flow unit? If nothing is happening to the flow unit—no test, no progress, no service—then that’s considered waste. It’s waiting time, idle storage, or paperwork that hasn’t moved.

But—and this is important—not all waiting is waste.

Sometimes, like aging cheese or whiskey, waiting is the process.

The Need Defines the Value

This chapter brings a human touch by discussing how value is always tied to needs, and not just the obvious ones. People have both direct needs (a diagnosis, a haircut, a permit) and indirect needs (feeling safe, being respected, understanding what’s happening).

If an experience ignores those emotional or psychological needs, it might look efficient on paper but feel wrong in real life.

That’s why a dentist visit that’s “too efficient” might actually be terrifying.

And in Sarah’s case, getting a diagnosis in two hours might have been too fast emotionally, even if it was fast technically. Organizations must understand that perception of value matters as much as actual value.

Flow Efficiency Is About Value Density, Not Speed

The authors make another critical point: flow efficiency is not about doing things faster—it’s about making sure the time spent is meaningful. Imagine two hairdressers.

One takes 40 minutes, the other 30. At first glance, the shorter time seems better.

But what if the first provided more care, attention, and value during the extra 10 minutes?

Flow efficiency focuses on the density of value transfer—how much of the process time is spent adding value—not just how quickly you go. It’s not about rushing; it’s about making every moment count.

Processes Are Everywhere—Not Just Formal Ones

Many people assume processes are just formal, documented routines. But this chapter clears that up. Every organization has processes, formal or not.

That’s how things move forward—through sequences of activity. Whether you’re onboarding a new employee or baking bread, you’re in a process.

Some companies try to define everything (like Volvo, which once documented thousands of processes), while others generalize into a handful.

Both approaches are valid—it depends on where you draw boundaries and how abstract you want to be. Every main process can be broken into sub-processes, which can be broken down even further.

This chapter deepens our understanding of flow efficiency by explaining how it’s tied to process thinking. To design better systems, we have to understand how work actually happens—where the value is, where the waste is, and how the journey looks from the perspective of the person or object flowing through.

It reminds us that efficiency isn’t just a technical concept—it’s deeply human. What we perceive as valuable is often shaped by experience, expectations, and emotion.

Chapter 3 – What Makes a Process Flow

This chapter brings in a dose of reality—and math. It shows us that flow efficiency isn’t just a feel-good idea about making things smoother.

It’s actually governed by three universal laws that affect every process, no matter the type of organization.

These laws explain why achieving both high flow efficiency and high resource efficiency is so hard. And most of the struggle boils down to one unavoidable thing: variation.

A Stressful Trip Through the Airport

The authors use a vivid example to kick things off—navigating an airport when you’re late for a flight. From missed trains to slow security lines to that one passenger who holds everything up, it’s a perfect metaphor for how real-life processes feel. Everything about your flow through the airport is affected by how others perform, how lines build up, and how fast each step takes.

That stressful journey becomes the backdrop for explaining how processes behave—and why they break down.

Little’s Law

This is the first law we meet, and it’s a surprisingly simple one: Throughput time = number of flow units in process × cycle time

In plain terms, it means the time it takes to get through a process depends on how many items (or people) are inside the system and how long it takes to handle each one.

At airport security, you picked the shortest line—but it moved slower because each person took longer to process. That mistake cost you time.

Here’s the paradox: if we want our expensive specialists (or security staff, or machines) to always be busy, we need a buffer—a line of patients or products or tasks ready to go.

But the more we pile into the system, the more we slow it down. More flow units increase throughput time. So even as we improve resource efficiency (keeping people busy), we hurt flow efficiency (keeping the process smooth).

The Law of Bottlenecks

The second law shows up in the form of familiar pain: bottlenecks. These are the slowest parts of a process that cause queues and delays.

The law says that throughput time is determined by the slowest stage—the bottleneck.

Right before a bottleneck, there’s always a line. Right after it, resources are underused because they’re waiting for things to arrive.

Even when we fix one bottleneck, another one usually pops up elsewhere. It’s like the Whac-A-Mole game—you solve one issue, and another one appears.

This is especially frustrating in structured, step-by-step systems (like airport security or healthcare). The steps must happen in a fixed order, which naturally creates points of congestion. And that leads us to the real troublemaker: variation.

The Law of the Effect of Variation

Here’s where things get really interesting. This law explains how variation—differences in timing, quality, or arrival rates—completely disrupts flow. It can come from:

• Resources: Some machines break more often. Some employees work faster or slower.
• Flow units: Some patients are harder to diagnose. Some paperwork is incomplete. Some haircuts take longer.
• External factors: Demand is uneven. A fire breaks out unexpectedly. A busload of people shows up at once.

All this variation causes delays, queues, and stress. It makes it nearly impossible to combine high flow efficiency (smooth movement) with high resource efficiency (always keeping people busy).

Even worse, variation amplifies exponentially. This is what Kingman’s Formula shows: as you get closer to 100% resource utilization, your throughput time explodes. A little more pressure on an already-busy system creates huge delays.

So, What Can We Do?

The authors point out four big ways to improve flow efficiency—but admit none are easy:

1. Reduce the number of flow units in process – in other words, avoid building up queues and backlogs.
2. Work faster – speed up cycle time (without cutting corners).
3. Add resources – more people or machines to handle the load.
4. Reduce variation – standardize where possible, especially in predictable processes.

But here’s the twist: most organizations are set up to chase resource efficiency. They want their people and machines busy all the time.

That mindset creates queues, delays, and extra work—ironically making the system less efficient overall. This is what the authors call the efficiency paradox: chasing one kind of efficiency ruins the other.

This chapter delivers a wake-up call: if we don’t understand the natural laws of how processes behave, we’ll keep designing systems that fail.

The math behind Little’s Law, bottlenecks, and variation isn’t optional—it’s unavoidable.

And unless we start focusing on flow—not just on keeping people busy—we’ll keep stressing our systems and frustrating our customers.

Chapter 4 – The Efficiency Paradox

This chapter gets to the heart of the book’s main message: the more we try to be resource efficient, the more inefficient we actually become. It’s a paradox that plays out in nearly every organization—and it quietly eats up time, money, and energy.

Why Resource Efficiency Creates New Problems

Most organizations see high capacity utilization as the ultimate goal. If every employee is constantly busy and every machine is running non-stop, that must be good, right?

But here’s the problem: focusing too much on resource efficiency often creates secondary needs—extra tasks, frustration, and delays—that wouldn’t exist in a flow-efficient system.

The authors call this the efficiency paradox: the more we chase resource efficiency, the more unnecessary work we generate. And it happens through three main sources of inefficiency.

First Source: Long Throughput Times

The first big issue is how long it takes for things to get done. We saw this earlier with Alison’s 42-day wait for her diagnosis.

That delay didn’t just mean she waited longer—it created a domino effect of new needs. She became anxious, took time off work, her employer had to find a replacement, which led to training, mistakes, unhappy customers, and more.

That one delay kicked off a chain reaction of resource use that never would have existed if the original need had been fulfilled faster.

It’s the same with project delays, late meetings, or missing information. When something takes too long, it tends to break things downstream.

Second Source: Too Many Flow Units at Once

The next issue is what happens when there’s too much going on at the same time. Whether it’s emails piling up, too many customers waiting, or work-in-progress building on the shop floor, the result is the same: our brains get overwhelmed.

People have a limited ability to manage multiple things. Studies suggest we can only keep five to nine things in mind at once. Beyond that, we start forgetting, making mistakes, and losing our sense of control. That’s when secondary needs emerge—like sorting, categorizing, creating new structures, and redoing work.

Inventory is a great example. When flow efficiency is low, inventory builds up. That means more space, more storage, more effort to find things—and more room for mistakes.

Just like a messy inbox creates the need to figure out where to start, too many items in a system force people to stop adding value and start organizing the mess instead.

Third Source: Too Many Restarts

The third problem is all about restarting work—either because we’re switching tasks too often or because work gets handed over too many times. Restarting kills flow.

Every time we pick something back up, we need to re-read, refocus, and reorient ourselves. That’s called mental set-up time. And it’s exhausting.

Handovers between people make it worse. The classic example is calling customer support, getting bounced between three people, and having to explain the same issue each time.

It’s not just frustrating for the customer—it wastes time for the company too. Each handover risks errors, misunderstandings, and a loss of accountability.

In highly resource-efficient systems, these restarts become more frequent because everyone is juggling too much and handing things off constantly. And each restart creates more secondary needs: coordination, clarification, corrections.

Superfluous Work: The Hidden Waste

All these secondary needs lead to what the authors call superfluous work—extra effort that looks like work, feels like work, but actually shouldn’t exist in the first place.

There’s a great personal example in the chapter: the authors talk about how they manage their receipts.

Rather than dealing with each one quickly, they let them pile up. Later, they end up spending time sorting, labeling, filing, searching calendars to remember what the receipt was for—then feel proud of the system they’ve created.

But all of that effort is only necessary because they didn’t deal with the receipts when they came in.

That’s superfluous work in action. It happens all the time in organizations. Teams build complex tracking systems, new checklists, or status meetings just to manage work that could have been avoided entirely with better flow.

Resolving the Paradox

The solution isn’t to push people harder or optimize every little step. It’s to rethink how we approach work entirely. The answer lies in focusing on flow efficiency—moving the flow unit (the customer, the task, the product) smoothly through the system.

In a flow-efficient organization, tasks don’t sit idle. Handovers are seamless, and everyone takes responsibility for the whole journey.

The chapter compares it to a 4×100 relay race. In a great team, the handoff is clean, smooth, and fast. In a resource-efficient system, the baton gets dropped, the runners are late, and the whole thing falls apart.

This chapter challenges us to look deeper. What if the “busyness” we see around us—our jam-packed schedules and overworked systems—are just signs of inefficiency?

What if, on a societal level, we’re burning through resources not because we’re productive, but because we’re stuck in the efficiency paradox?

By shifting our mindset from maximizing resource usage to maximizing value flow, we can reduce superfluous work and unlock a smoother, faster, more human way of working.

That’s where lean comes in—and that’s where the book heads next.

Chapter 5 – Once Upon a Time… How Toyota Became Number One Through Customer Focus

If the previous chapters built the case for why flow efficiency matters, this one tells the story of a company that actually built its success on it—Toyota.

This chapter dives into how Toyota became a global leader not by maximizing how busy its factories were, but by making sure every product moved smoothly through the system.

And the backdrop to all this? A country recovering from war, with barely any resources to spare.

Why Toyota Chose Flow Over Resource Efficiency

Toyota was born in 1937, with the ambitious goal of building cars for Japan’s local market. But after World War II, Japan was a country in ruins. Factories had limited land, outdated machines, scarce raw materials, and barely any money to invest.

They didn’t have the luxury of making mistakes. So while Western carmakers focused on mass production, Toyota had to think differently. They couldn’t afford big inventories or long delays. That constraint led them to something revolutionary: flow efficiency.

Two core principles shaped this evolution—jidoka and just-in-time.

The Roots of Lean: Jidoka and Just-in-Time

Toyota’s founder, Kiichiro Toyoda, was inspired by his father Sakichi, who had invented a loom that automatically stopped when a thread broke.

That idea—machines stopping themselves when something went wrong—was called jidoka, or “automation with a human touch.” It was about building intelligence into the system so that problems could be spotted and solved right away.

Kiichiro took that thinking into car manufacturing and added another key element: just-in-time. This principle meant that nothing should be made unless there was actual demand.

No huge piles of inventory. No production “just in case.” Everything should move through the factory like a steady river, not a stagnant pond.

A Country with Scarce Resources Forces a Different Kind of Efficiency

Because land, machines, materials, and money were all in short supply, Toyota had no choice but to make every unit, every minute, and every decision count. That led to two major ways of thinking that still guide lean organizations today.

1. Doing the Right Things

Toyota had to make sure they were building the right cars—the ones people actually wanted to buy. This wasn’t a vague goal; they broke it down into three precise questions:

• What product does the customer want?
• When do they want it?
• How many do they need?

That led to the development of a pull system, where customer orders trigger the entire production chain.

Nothing is made unless someone upstream—another internal customer—asks for it. Every step in the factory became both a supplier to the next one and a customer to the previous one.

That created a chain of clear communication, with every part of the process working toward fulfilling a real, specific customer request.

2. Doing Things Right

It wasn’t enough to make the right products; Toyota also had to make them well. They couldn’t afford scrap or mistakes. So they built quality into the process. If something went wrong, anyone on the line could pull a cord and stop the entire system.

This wasn’t seen as a failure—it was a chance to learn, fix, and improve. Quality control became everyone’s job.

Toyota also worked hard to reduce anything that didn’t add value. They identified seven kinds of waste:

• Overproduction – Making too much, too early
• Waiting – Idle time for people or machines
• Transportation – Unnecessary movement of materials
• Overprocessing – Doing more work than necessary
• Inventory – Stuff sitting around, tying up money
• Motion – Workers moving inefficiently
• Defects – Producing anything that has to be fixed

Each of these wastes stood in the way of flow. Toyota’s goal was to eliminate them—not just because they were inefficient, but because they slowed down the value stream.

Why It All Worked: Seeing the Whole System

What made Toyota special wasn’t just its individual practices. It was how those practices fit together into a big-picture view.

Every part of the company—from suppliers to production to delivery—was connected by a clear flow of value.

Everyone knew their role, not just in doing their task, but in serving the next person in line.

That’s why Toyota’s system felt smooth, coordinated, and fast—even without fancy technology or big budgets.

The Beginning of Lean

What Western companies saw when they visited Toyota was something new. They called it “lean”—a system that delivered more with less by focusing on flow and eliminating waste.

But at its core, it wasn’t about cutting costs.

It was about creating value without interruption, respecting the customer’s time, and designing systems that make problems visible.

Chapter 6 – Welcome to the Wild West… We Call It Lean

This chapter tells the story of how the world outside Toyota discovered its production secrets—and then tried to make sense of them.

What started as a practical approach inside one Japanese carmaker slowly turned into a global movement.

But with that growth came confusion. Today, we call it “lean.” But what does that even mean anymore?

TPS: Born Inside Toyota, Long Before “Lean” Existed

Toyota’s production philosophy, now known as the Toyota Production System (TPS), didn’t emerge overnight. It evolved over decades, shaped by trial, error, and real problems. While Japan embraced it deeply—even selling “TPS for Dummies” in bookstores—the West only began noticing it in the late 1980s.

The man behind much of this was Taiichi Ohno, often called the “Father of TPS.” Working closely with Eiji Toyoda, he helped shape a system that rejected big-batch production and emphasized flow. In his now-legendary book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production, Ohno laid it out clearly:

“All we are doing is looking at the time-line from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the time-line by reducing the non-value adding wastes.”

That line sums it all up. No fancy talk. Just a focus on time, value, and getting rid of waste.

The Birth of “Lean” in the West

The term “lean” didn’t come from Toyota. It was coined in 1988 by John Krafcik, who noticed something strange while studying car manufacturers: factories with simpler technology, smaller batches, and fewer buffers were outperforming the high-tech giants.

He called these fragile-looking—but high-performing—systems “lean,” because they did more with less.

That idea snowballed into a larger research effort at MIT. In 1990, Womack, Jones, and Roos published The Machine That Changed the World, a best-seller that turned “lean production” into a buzzword.

Their research pointed to Toyota’s incredible results and boiled lean down to four core ideas:

1. Teamwork
2. Communication
3. Efficient use of resources and elimination of waste
4. Continuous improvement

A few years later, Womack and Jones took it further in Lean Thinking (1996), offering five steps for companies wanting to “get lean”:

1. Define value from the customer’s perspective
2. Map the value stream and remove waste
3. Make value-adding steps flow
4. Let the customer pull value
5. Strive for perfection—continuously

These principles helped companies apply lean thinking beyond the factory floor.

Fujimoto and the Deeper Capabilities of Toyota

While lean was gaining traction in the West, Takahiro Fujimoto in Japan was exploring the deeper layers behind Toyota’s success.

In his 1999 book The Evolution of a Manufacturing System at Toyota, he introduced three levels of capabilities:

• Routinized manufacturing capability – Doing the basics well
• Kaizen capability – Always improving
• Evolutionary capability – Building the ability to adapt and grow, even when facing setbacks

Fujimoto’s insight? Toyota doesn’t just follow rules—it evolves. That’s a huge part of its strength.

Decoding the DNA: The Four Rules of TPS

At the same time, researchers Steven Spear and H. Kent Bowen tried to unpack what made TPS tick. Their 1999 Harvard Business Review article Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System became a classic. They broke TPS down into four simple rules:

1. Every task must be clearly defined in terms of what, when, and how.
2. Every connection between people must be direct and unambiguous.
3. Every workflow must be simple and clear.
4. Improvements should be made using the scientific method, guided by a coach, at the lowest level possible.

These weren’t just tips—they were the invisible structure that made TPS resilient and powerful.

The Toyota Way: Internal Values Behind the System

In 2001, Toyota released an internal guide called The Toyota Way, which summarized its culture and values. It focused on two main areas: continuous improvement and respect for people.

Each area was broken down into principles like:

• Challenge – Taking on ambitious goals
• Kaizen – Continuous improvement
• Genchi Genbutsu – Go and see for yourself
• Respect – Trust and understanding
• Teamwork – Shared growth and collaboration

This wasn’t a marketing stunt. It was a short, internal document meant to align the entire organization—used inside Toyota, but rarely shared outside.

Liker’s Interpretation: The Toyota Way for the World

When Toyota became the world’s top carmaker, global interest surged again. In 2004, Jeffrey Liker published The Toyota Way, organizing the company’s approach into 14 principles under four themes:

1. Long-term thinking – Making decisions for the future, not short-term gains
2. Right process = right results – Flow, standardization, quality, and visual control
3. People development – Growing leaders, teams, and partnerships
4. Problem-solving – Deep investigation, consensus, and continuous learning

Liker’s book made Toyota’s philosophy accessible and popular in industries far beyond manufacturing.

The Lean Explosion—and the Confusion That Followed

As interest in lean exploded, so did the interpretations. By 2012, Amazon had hundreds of “lean” books on everything from lean healthcare to lean startups.

Some treated lean as a culture, others as a set of tools. Some as a philosophy, others as a concrete method.

And that’s where the chapter ends—with a warning. Lean has become a buzzword. It’s used in too many ways to mean too many things.

That creates a real challenge: how can anyone know what “lean” actually means anymore?

This chapter isn’t just a history lesson. It’s a reminder that lean isn’t just a toolkit—it’s a mindset.

It came from a company facing real constraints and needing to solve real problems. As lean spread across the world, it morphed into many shapes and flavors.

That’s both exciting and risky. If we forget where it started—and what it was really about—we risk turning lean into just another management fad.

Chapter 7 – What Lean Is Not

After introducing what lean is and tracing how it evolved, this chapter takes a bold step back.

It asks a different—and necessary—question: What is lean not? Because as the concept of lean spread across industries and disciplines, it became something dangerously vague.

Everyone loves it, uses it, claims it. But when something means everything, it ends up meaning nothing.

The authors break this down into three key problems that explain how the definition of lean has drifted away from its original intent.

Problem 1: Lean Is Defined at Different Levels of Abstraction

This part starts with a simple analogy: imagine being asked whether you want a piece of fruit, a pear, or a green apple. All are valid answers—but they exist on different levels of specificity. “Fruit” is broad. “Green apple” is precise. This is the abstraction problem.

When people define lean, some do it broadly—as a philosophy, culture, or mindset (fruit level). Others define it as a system for improvement or quality management (pear level).

Most define it as a set of methods or tools—like 5S, Kanban boards, or standardization (green apple level).

The problem? These definitions get mixed up. In a survey of lean professionals across industries, the authors found 17 different definitions of lean.

That’s not just a branding issue—it causes confusion in real practice. If lean is just a toolbox, it may not seem relevant outside of manufacturing. And if it’s only a vague philosophy, it becomes hard to apply.

This leads to a classic mistake: service industries trying to apply manufacturing tools without adapting them to their own context. They start their lean journey using the green apples from Toyota’s factory floor—but forget they’re trying to grow pears.

It’s no wonder they give up and say, “Lean doesn’t work here.”

If lean is defined too narrowly, it won’t spread. If it’s defined too abstractly, it won’t be useful. The key is to understand where your definition sits on that abstraction scale—and be intentional about it.

Problem 2: Lean as a Means Instead of an End

Next, the authors highlight a common confusion: people often treat lean methods as goals. This turns the whole purpose of lean on its head.

They bring in the example of Carolina Klüft, an undefeated heptathlete, who always emphasized having fun while competing. That was her goal. Her equipment, diet, and training were just the means. But too often in sport—and in business—we mistake the equipment or method for the actual goal.

The same thing happens with lean. Organizations proudly say, “We do daily stand-ups,” or “We implemented 5S,” as if that alone makes them lean. But why are they doing those things? What’s the actual outcome they’re trying to achieve?

Toyota uses standardization not for the sake of it, but to create a foundation for improvement. Visualization boards aren’t lean by themselves.

They’re a way to foster better communication and problem-solving. When these tools become the end goal, organizations forget why they started in the first place.

This confusion between means and ends leads to superficial implementations of lean—where companies go through the motions without real transformation.

They act like Toyota, but without the thinking behind it. And that limits how far lean can actually take them.

Problem 3: Lean Is Everything Good, and Everything Good Is Lean

Here’s the most philosophical—and perhaps most important—critique in this chapter: when lean becomes synonymous with every good outcome, it loses its meaning entirely.

In the same survey mentioned earlier, people gave 45 different reasons why their organizations implemented lean.

From improved quality to increased motivation, faster processes to better teamwork.

All great things—but when lean becomes the universal answer to every business problem, we stop asking what it actually is.

The authors explain this using the idea of falsifiability—a concept from science. A good theory should be able to be proven wrong. If lean is everything good, it can’t be tested, challenged, or improved. It becomes trivial.

They use a clever detective analogy: imagine a police investigator saying, “We know the suspect is a person who eats, sleeps, and has a heart.” That’s technically true, but not helpful. Compare it to saying, “The suspect is a man with long hair who hangs out at Café Wha?” That’s specific and testable.

When companies say things like “Our core value is customer orientation,” or “We’re implementing continuous improvement,” they may sound impressive—but if there’s no opposite path they rejected, it’s just empty talk.

To truly make lean valuable, it must be defined in a way that rules out alternatives, that makes trade-offs clear, and that helps organizations choose a direction. Lean is a specific choice—not a catch-all banner for anything good.

This chapter is an honest reckoning with the way lean has been misunderstood and misused. It challenges us to stop treating lean as a magic wand, a checklist, or a philosophy of vague positivity.

Lean is not everything that is good. And everything good is not lean.

Lean is a choice. A mindset. A system. A set of principles and practices applied with intent. To keep it meaningful, we must constantly ask ourselves:

• What level of abstraction are we using when we talk about lean?
• Are we treating the tools as goals instead of means?
• Are we adding clarity—or just layering on another buzzword?

By returning to these questions, we don’t just protect the integrity of lean—we unlock its real potential.

Chapter 8 – The Efficiency Matrix

At this point in the book, we’ve explored what lean is and what it isn’t, how it emerged from Toyota, and why it’s so often misunderstood.

Now comes a turning point: a new framework that helps us understand lean at a higher, more universal level.

The authors introduce the Efficiency Matrix—a powerful tool that brings clarity to how organizations operate and how they can improve.

Why the Efficiency Matrix Matters

The problem, as the authors explain, is that most definitions of lean are too narrow. They’re stuck at the “green apple” level—focused on specific tools or methods from manufacturing.

But lean isn’t just for factories anymore. If we want it to apply to all types of organizations, from tech companies to hospitals, we need a broader definition.

That’s where the efficiency matrix comes in. It allows us to look at lean through the lens of two types of efficiency: resource efficiency and flow efficiency.

The matrix shows four operational states based on whether an organization scores high or low in each of these efficiencies.

1. Efficient Islands (High Resource, Low Flow)
This is where many traditional organizations live. Each part of the company is highly efficient in how it uses its own resources, but there’s little coordination across the whole system. Flow units—like customers or products—get stuck waiting, transferred between departments, or buried under bureaucracy. It’s efficient in silos, but clunky overall.

2. Efficient Ocean (High Flow, Low Resource)
This is the opposite: the organization focuses on making things smooth for the customer. There’s free capacity, quick response times, and high availability. But because resources aren’t always fully utilized, this model sacrifices resource efficiency. It’s flow-centric but less lean in its use of internal assets.

3. Wasteland (Low Resource, Low Flow)
Nobody wants to be here. This is the worst-case scenario: poor use of resources and slow, ineffective flow. Things pile up. Customers are frustrated. Employees are exhausted. There’s little structure, and everyone is reacting instead of planning.

4. The Perfect State (High Resource, High Flow)
This is the dream: an organization that uses its resources wisely while still delivering smooth and fast value to the customer. But as the authors quickly point out, this “star” position is theoretically perfect but practically impossible. Why? One word: variation.

Variation Sets the Boundaries

Variation is the main reason why most organizations can’t live in the perfect state. There are two kinds:

• Variation in demand: We can’t perfectly predict what customers want, when they want it, or how much of it they’ll need. Even with advanced forecasting, there’s always uncertainty.
• Variation in supply: Even if we knew what customers wanted, our systems (people, machines, technology) aren’t perfectly reliable or flexible. Things break. People make mistakes. Plans change.

These two types of variation create what the authors call the efficiency frontier—a boundary that limits how close an organization can get to the perfect state.

The more variation you face, the more that frontier pushes inward. For example, a factory making the same product every day has a better chance of reaching high efficiency than a hospital emergency room, which deals with constant unpredictability.

Strategic Positioning: Choosing Where You Want to Be

Here’s where things get practical. The authors argue that while variation sets your limits, strategy determines your position inside the matrix. It’s not about blindly chasing perfection. It’s about making smart, intentional trade-offs.

They explain the difference between business strategy and operations strategy:

• Business strategy defines what kind of customer need the organization wants to satisfy (e.g., cost, speed, luxury).
• Operations strategy defines how the organization will fulfill that need (e.g., by prioritizing resource efficiency or flow efficiency).

For example:

• Ryanair focuses on low-cost travel. Its business strategy prioritizes cost over comfort. Its operations strategy maximizes resource efficiency—keeping planes in the air, minimizing staff, and using remote airports. Passengers deal with delays and discomfort, but tickets are cheap.
• Luxury hotels focus on flow efficiency—ensuring every customer interaction is smooth, quick, and pleasant. That means having spare capacity, more staff, and fewer delays. It’s expensive, but the experience justifies the price.

Movement Within the Matrix: Real Stories of Change

The chapter ends with four fictional—but realistic—case studies showing how companies move within the matrix depending on their goals and actions:

• A Start-Up (Point A): Initially low in both efficiencies, it improves by introducing structure and reducing chaos—gaining both resource and flow efficiency.
• A Bathroom Refurbishing Company (Point B): High in resource efficiency but slow on delivery, it improves flow by reorganizing teams, even if it means some idle capacity.
• A Manufacturing Firm (Point C): Already good at using resources, it makes a transformation that also improves flow—getting closer to the ideal state.
• A Luxury Hotel (Point D): High in flow but losing money, it shifts strategy to improve resource use—even at the cost of some customer experience.

Each story shows that movement within the matrix is possible, and that improvements are not always about “doing more”—sometimes it’s about choosing better.

Lean 2.0: A Definition with Meaning

So what is lean, really? The authors define it as an operational strategy that focuses on maximizing value through flow efficiency while managing resource use appropriately. It’s not about doing everything faster. It’s not about blindly following Toyota. And it’s definitely not about copying tools out of context.

The efficiency matrix gives lean a structure. It allows companies to see where they are, decide where they want to be, and make smart moves. Most importantly, it shifts lean from being a toolbox to being a strategic decision.

Chapter 9 – This Is Lean!

After all the theory, models, and case studies, this chapter brings everything together. It’s where the authors finally answer the big question: What is lean?

But they don’t just hand over a neat definition. Instead, they walk us through how lean shows up in the real world—through the lens of a car inspection process—and why that story holds the key to understanding lean at its core.

A Real-World Example: The Super-Quick Car Inspection

The story begins with Toyota’s car dealer operations in Japan. Since 1996, Toyota has been developing a service concept called Toyota Sales Logistics (TSL)—essentially a lean model applied to the dealership level. This includes not just car sales, but also distribution and maintenance. One part of that? Car inspections.

In Japan, cars must undergo inspection three years after purchase, then every two years after that. The process is rigorous, often requiring three hours of actual work.

But traditionally, it could take a week to complete—because cars sat waiting in crowded lots, technicians juggled too many tasks, and procedures varied wildly. Technicians were always busy, but that didn’t mean the system was efficient.

This traditional process was a classic case of high perceived resource efficiency, but low actual flow efficiency.

The dealership thought it was running smoothly because everyone was busy, but the customer experience was poor—and there was a lot of invisible waste: waiting time, movement, inventory, unnecessary planning, and variation in how inspections were done.

The New Process: Designed for Flow

Toyota redesigned the inspection process with one clear goal: increase flow efficiency. They wanted customers to come in, wait in the lounge, and leave with their car—fully inspected—in just 45 minutes.

To make that possible, they created a fully standardized process. Every task was documented, sequenced, timed, and practiced.

They introduced a team structure: two technicians worked simultaneously on different sides of the car, while an inspector oversaw the whole process. Movement was minimized by rethinking the physical layout.

Specialized tools were introduced to eliminate bottlenecks. And visual boards kept everyone aligned on what was happening.

The result? A system that was faster, more reliable, and less stressful—for both customers and employees. It also allowed for better scheduling, more predictable workloads, and improved relationships with customers, since sales staff had more time to engage during the inspection.

The Journey Through the Efficiency Matrix

The authors then apply the efficiency matrix to analyze this transformation:

• Point A: Perceived Starting Point – High resource use, low flow. Everyone was busy, but the customer waited days. Looked efficient on the surface—but wasn’t.
• Point B: Actual Starting Point – Once they dug deeper, they realized resource efficiency wasn’t so great either. Much of the work was superfluous.
• Path C: Improving Flow Efficiency – Through standardization, teamwork, and smarter layouts, they significantly reduced delays and non-value-adding work.
• Path D: Improving Resource Efficiency – With clearer routines and planning, they started using technician time more effectively. The same 45-minute routine could now be repeated and optimized across shifts.
• Point E: Final Position – The system was dramatically better—but still didn’t aim for 100% utilization. Toyota’s strategy intentionally preserves some free capacity to handle variation and remain flexible.

This improvement followed a U-shaped curve: from a seemingly efficient island, through the messy wasteland of reality, then up into the efficient ocean—where both flow and resource efficiency were dramatically better.

So… What Is Lean, Then?

Using this journey, the authors build a definition of lean that finally answers the big questions raised earlier in the book. Here’s how they break it down:

• Lean is an operations strategy. It’s about how an organization chooses to produce and deliver value—not a toolbox, not a mindset, not a culture. A strategy.
• Lean prioritizes flow efficiency over resource efficiency. This is the key distinction. Rather than making sure every worker or machine is constantly busy, lean focuses on making the customer’s journey as smooth, fast, and valuable as possible.
• Lean is a path, not a place. The perfect “star” in the matrix (high resource and high flow efficiency) is unreachable due to real-world variation. But lean is about moving toward it—continuously improving, step by step.
• Lean adapts to context. It’s not about copying Toyota’s tools, but about understanding the principles behind their choices. Your version of lean might look different depending on your business, your customers, and your challenges.
• Lean is defined at a high level. This “fruit-level” definition avoids getting stuck in tools or checklists. It focuses on what lean aims to achieve, not how it always looks.

This chapter doesn’t just define lean—it reframes it. It shows that lean is not a set of practices pulled from a Japanese car factory. It’s a strategic decision to focus on flow.

And once that focus is clear, everything else—tools, methods, behaviors—should align with that purpose.

It also wraps up the confusion from Chapter 7. The authors show how their definition of lean:

• Operates at the right level of abstraction
• Focuses on the goal, not the tools
• Is non-trivial, meaning it excludes alternatives and clarifies what lean is not

By the end, we’re left with a lean that is clear, testable, and adaptable. Not a trend. Not a buzzword.

But a strategy that any organization can choose—if they’re ready to focus not on how busy their people are, but on how much value they’re really delivering.

Chapter 10 – Realizing a Lean Operations Strategy

After nine chapters of exploring what lean is, how it works, and how it’s misunderstood, this chapter finally asks the most important question: How do we actually realize a lean operations strategy?

And as it turns out, the answer doesn’t start with tools or methods—it starts with values.

The Naïve Foreigner and the Pyramid of TPS

The heart of this chapter is a brilliant story: a visit to Toyota’s Tokyo office where three researchers—one of them a Swedish foreigner—meet Nishida-san, a senior manager tasked with improving efficiency across Toyota’s sales and service processes.

What follows is not a discussion about tools or templates. It’s a masterclass in Toyota’s thinking, delivered through metaphors, drawings, and a quiet but sharp critique of how the rest of the world misunderstands TPS.

The foreigner asks what seems like a logical question: How do you adapt Toyota’s lean tools to service processes?
Nishida-san pauses, sighs, and replies:

“Yet another foreigner who does not understand anything.”

It’s not meant to be harsh—just honest. And what comes next is a metaphor about a tree.

The Tree Metaphor: A Living System of Lean

Nishida-san explains that when Toyota was founded, they imagined the company as a newly planted tree. They didn’t know how to care for it, so they began by defining what kind of tree they wanted it to become. That led to a clear set of values—their North Star for everything they would do.

At the top of the whiteboard pyramid, he writes values. These represent how the organization should behave—regardless of the situation.

From those values grew principles—the next level in the pyramid. These are about how Toyota should make decisions. Nishida-san identifies two core principles that form the backbone of TPS:

• Just-in-time: Deliver exactly what the customer wants, when they want it, in the right amount. It’s like a soccer match where the ball moves fluidly across the field to score a goal.
• Jidoka: Build systems that create visibility, clarity, and awareness. In soccer terms, it means being able to see the field, the players, the ball, the scoreboard, and hear the whistle. In most organizations, this visibility is missing. It’s like playing soccer under a tent with multiple balls and no idea what’s happening elsewhere.

From Principles to Methods

As Toyota refined these principles, they started to notice patterns in how they worked. This led to methods—standardized ways of performing tasks. These methods were built specifically to realize just-in-time and jidoka.

For example:

• Standardization became a method to make sure everyone was aligned on how to carry out a task.
• Visual planning emerged as a method to enable jidoka—making work visible so deviations from normal could be spotted instantly.

Here’s the key: Toyota didn’t start with these tools and methods. They evolved from principles, which evolved from values.

Tools and Activities: The Bottom of the Pyramid

At the base of the pyramid are tools (what we use) and activities (what we do). These are the most visible parts of lean—the things people usually try to copy. But as Nishida-san demonstrates (with a bit of humor), hitting a whiteboard could be a “method” if used intentionally. The point is: tools and activities are only meaningful when they are part of a larger system.

“Lean is not a checklist. It’s not a toolbox. It’s a system. And everything in that system is connected.”

Putting It All Together: The Pyramid of Realization

Nishida-san’s whiteboard ends up as a clear framework:

• Values – How we should be
• Principles – How we should think
• Methods – What we should do
• Tools & Activities – What we need and what we perform

Everything flows from the top down—and must be aligned to create flow efficiency.

Means for Realizing a Lean Operations Strategy

After the story, the authors reflect on what the pyramid really teaches us. Lean isn’t just methods or tools—it’s an operations strategy, and to realize it, we need to use the right means at the right level of abstraction.

Here’s how different means contribute to reducing variation (which is the key to improving flow efficiency):

• Values reduce variation in how people behave
• Principles reduce variation in how people think and make decisions
• Methods reduce variation in how people do tasks
• Tools reduce variation in what people use to do their work

When organizations get this wrong, they start copying Toyota’s tools without understanding the values or principles behind them.

But just because a tool worked in Toyota’s context (high-volume, low-variation manufacturing) doesn’t mean it works in every setting. Tools are highly context-dependent. Values and principles are more universal.

This chapter beautifully ties the entire book together. It challenges us to stop asking, “What lean tools should we use?” and start asking, “How do we design a system that creates flow efficiency in our context?” And the answer isn’t one-size-fits-all.

It’s about building your own system—one that is rooted in clear values, guided by strong principles, supported by thoughtful methods, and executed through useful tools.

Toyota shares its tools not because they are perfect, but because they are solutions to problems they faced. Your problems may be different. Your tools should be too.

Chapter 11 – Are You Lean? Learn to Fish!

This chapter delivers a powerful message that ties the entire book together. It begins with a deceptively simple question—“Are we lean?”—and ends with a completely different perspective: lean is not something you are, it’s something you continuously become. This final chapter is all about mindset.

The Factory Tour and the Lesson from Ooba-san

We’re introduced to a European engineering company that had become a poster child for lean in its industry. Their workspaces were spotless. Their visual planning boards were impressive. Inventory was low. Teams were engaged. They had done everything right—or so it seemed.

To get validation, they flew in Ooba-san, a legendary Toyota manager who once worked directly with Ohno-san himself. After proudly showing off their achievements, they asked, “We are lean, aren’t we?”

Ooba-san’s reply was simple and a bit cryptic:

“Interesting.”

Even after seeing how every employee understood their role and goals, and how improvement was part of their culture, Ooba-san repeated the same word:

“Interesting.”

Frustration grew. Finally, someone asked: “Do you consider this to be world-class lean?”
And Ooba-san calmly replied:

“It is impossible for me to say. I wasn’t here yesterday.”

That answer, though short, carried deep meaning.

Lean Is Not a Destination

Ooba-san’s response reveals something fundamental: lean is not a state you reach—it’s a dynamic journey. It’s not about what the company looked like on the day of the visit. It’s about whether things are improving over time. Lean isn’t static. It’s defined by continuous movement.

If lean is an operations strategy focused on improving flow efficiency without sacrificing (and ideally improving) resource efficiency, then the question isn’t “Are we lean?” The real question is:

“Is our flow improving, day after day?”

Static vs. Dynamic Thinking

The chapter explains two contrasting views of improvement:

• Static View: Lean is a goal. You launch a project, implement improvements, compare before and after, and then celebrate success. The process has a beginning and an end. It’s about catching the fish.
• Dynamic View: Lean is a mindset. It’s about always improving, always learning, always asking what could be done better. There is no finish line. The process never ends. It’s about learning how to fish—and getting better at it every day.

The authors show two illustrations: one where flow efficiency jumps once and then stays flat (the static view), and one where it continually improves over time (the dynamic view). The second model is what lean really is.

What Makes an Organization Truly Lean?

According to this chapter, an organization is lean only if it is continuously improving its flow efficiency. That means:

• Teams learn something new every day
• There is always experimentation and reflection
• New knowledge is generated about customer needs
• People are equipped with the ability to adapt, adjust, and improve

If the improvements are only ever driven by one-off projects or external consultants, that’s not lean. That’s catching a fish and moving on. Real lean is teaching people to fish—for life.

Catching the Big Fish vs. Learning to Fish

The metaphor at the end of the chapter is simple, but powerful. Most organizations approach improvement like catching a big fish.

They invest time and money to solve a big problem, declare success, and move on. But Toyota approaches improvement as a lifelong skill: fishing.

There will always be new fish—new problems, challenges, and changes. So the real question every organization must ask is:

“Are we building our ability to fish, or are we just chasing the next fish?”

Learning to fish means empowering everyone in the organization to think, learn, improve, and grow—not once, but continuously. That’s the essence of a lean operations strategy.

Why This Chapter Matters

This chapter is a reminder that lean is not a toolkit. It’s not a label you earn. It’s not something you implement once and check off your list.

Lean is a living, evolving, strategic way of operating that keeps getting better with time.

You don’t “arrive” at lean. You work toward it every day—by thinking dynamically, learning constantly, and making sure your organization can always fish.

4 Key Ideas from This is Lean

6 Main Lessons from This is Lean

My Book Highlights & Quotes

Flow efficiency focuses on the amount of time it takes from identifying a need to satisfying that need.

Flow efficiency is the sum of value-adding activities in relation to the throughput time.

The efficiency paradox means we are wasting resources at the individual, organizational, and perhaps even societal levels.

Conclusion

In the end, This Is Lean isn’t about copying Toyota or installing fancy boards on the wall. It’s about changing how we think about work, value, and improvement.

It shows that real efficiency isn’t about doing more—it’s about doing what matters, in a way that flows. And once you start seeing the world through that lens, it’s hard to unsee.

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• Book Notes #123: The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman2024-05-09

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