Line Management

Developing a Kaizen Consciousness with Shingo Prize winner Michael Balle

Michael Ballé, co-author of The Lean Manager, published by the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), cautioned in a podcast interview with Business 901 that managers or executives without strong commitments to self-development should not try lean manufacturing and lean management. "Lean is something you want to do to beat competitors, and it’s going to take extra work, especially at first," Ballé said. "Lean is targeted to a certain kind of person who enjoys learning and is committed to self-development as opposed to just running things as they are.” The Lean Manager is a business novel about a lean transformation where managers at a failing plant must go beyond implementing lean manufacturing tools to creating lean management system that changes the way they think and act.