The term "lean thinking" was coined by mechanical engineer and MIT graduate student John Krafcik in 1988, who subsequently went on to run Google LLC's autonomous driving unit for many years.
Lean thinking was born out of studying the rise of Toyota Motor Company from a bankrupt Japanese automaker in the early 1950s to today's dominant global player.
[4] At every stage of its expansion, Toyota remained a puzzle by capturing new markets with products deemed relatively unattractive and with systematically lower costs while not following any of the usual management dictates.
[6] In this, lean thinking departs markedly from mainstream management: Lean thinking at senior level creates leaner enterprises because sales increase through customer satisfaction with higher quality products or services, because cash improve as flexibility reduces the need for inventories or backlogs, because costs reduce through identifying costly policies that create waste at value-adding level, and because capital expenditure is less needed as people themselves invent smarter, leaner processes to flow work continuously at takt time without waste.
[9] Practising lean thinking offers a radically new way to look at traditional goods and service production to learn how to sustain the same benefits at a lower cost, financially and environmentally.