A few years ago, lean thinking came to light. It sounded similar to what I had learned about the “pull” system. I wondered why we renamed cycle time reduction, or just in time (JIT), “lean.” Cycle time reduction was easy to understand and related to responsiveness to customer demands and waste reduction. What does “lean” mean?

Last year, I was asked to teach a class at one of the car manufacturers in Detroit. During the introduction, I was told, “So, you are going to teach us lean. Lean means mean. Lean means layoffs. We don’t want to learn lean. Do not teach us lean.” So there I was, hired to teach a class students didn’t want to learn. Something wasn’t right. A week later I received a call from Ohio to implement lean at a company there. The lean leader said, “We have been improving a lot, we have a new chief operating officer and his first question is about headcount reduction due to lean implementation.” I concluded then that there were three strikes against lean: It’s a renamed JIT, it’s disliked by employees and it has negative measures of success.

About a month ago, I was listening to a lean sensei. He gave a great presentation to 40 executives about lean and its promise for U.S. corporations. As I heard again that lean is based on Toyota’s production system (TPS), I wondered why Toyota didn’t name its TPS lean, or why other companies took TPS and called it lean.

I compared Toyota’s results with other corporations in the United States. Toyota continues to grow as it perfects its production system. On the other hand, U.S. corporations continue to lay off people when implementing lean. Something must have gone wrong while we learned TPS and transformed it into lean thinking.

Listening further to the lean sensei, I learned that what makes Toyota successful are discipline, process simplification, housekeeping, listening to people’s ideas and a commitment to perfection. The intent of TPS isn’t to cut cost, it’s to perfect the manufacturing system and produce the best products in the shortest time possible. One of the first tenets of TPS isn’t to lay off employees to improve, it’s to redeploy them to create more value.

In most U.S. companies, lean starts as a cost-cutting initiative, not as an attempt to perfect the production system by eliminating waste and improving processes. It starts with the implementation of kanban and visual manufacturing systems. Typically, lean starts with a one-day lean simulation training and one week of “kaizen blitz,” which consists of value stream mapping, relaying out the factory floor and a kanban system. After the kaizen blitz managers get rewarded, a story gets published and headcounts are right sized in the affected area. The blitzing process goes on for a year or two, departments change and look different and improvements are registered. A new operations manager is hired, who’s probably a lean sensei too. The company still has fundamental problems, such as a lack of the desire for perfection that existed prior to the lean implementation. This is when lean hits the wall and the same old problems show their heads again.

According to Wikipedia, the idea of lean manufacturing dates back to great thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Frank Gilbreth, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Shigeo Shingo, Taiichi Ohno and Henry Ford. None of them referred to their waste reduction efforts as lean. They used phrases such as motion efficiency, waste of time, standardization, mass assembly and production system. Taiichi Ohno, the person behind TPS, says he learned it all from Ford’s book Today and Tomorrow (reprint edition: Productivity Press, 1988). Ford didn’t call it lean, and it worked for him. Today Ford Motor Co. implements lean, and it’s not the same.

Where did we go wrong? Except for Toyota, no one learned the concept of lean from the original source, Henry Ford. Borrowing (or benchmarking) means locating the best practice and copying it intelligently. We are all for perfecting production systems, improving processes, listening to employees, reducing waste and creating jobs. But we must be strong enough to question when we aren’t listening to employees, when we’re making employees lose their jobs, and when we’re “leaning” their thinking.

We must expand U.S. businesses by driving innovation, reducing waste and listening to employees, rather than making them leaner. Otherwise, we will continue to weaken our entrepreneurial foundation for creating value and jobs.

Lean was already a fad before lean thinking was introduced to businesses. I’m speaking of obesity and the proliferation of lean meat, lean diets, etc. With the introduction of lean thinking to business, people immediately related it to extra weight. So shed the weight, right? But, we know that extreme leaning can lead to anorexia, which can lead to death. The same idea can be applied to organizations.