Does lean have a clearly delineated limit? When a company starts out on that path, should it expect an endpoint, a completion, an arrival? Is it a forever commitment, or is it a bounded outcome that companies can achieve and then move on? In short, is lean a destination or a process?

These aren't philosophical questions but practical, hard-nosed issues that a company must address before it can legitimately commit to a journey of change—or before it can be confidently be ready to invest the considerable resources such a journey will entail. Let’s examine the current state of lean in this regard—or should we say the current “array of runaway lean.”

The journey started for me in 1983, the year I joined Productivity Inc. as its lead consultant and principal developer of methods coming out of Toyota. Back then just-in-time (JIT) production ruled—grounded in a handful of very specific Toyota-based methods: quality at the source (an approach to mistake proofing); single-minute exchange of dies (SMED), and quick changeover; producing to takt time; and pull or kanban systems. Interestingly, cellular design and standard work went unnoticed at the time. They were too deeply embedded, and it would be several more years before they were specifically noted or named.

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