How does The Gold Mine fit in with existing literature that teaches lean thinking or change management?
A. The truth is that part of what makes lean difficult is the linkage between change management and the lean tools. Most books that tackle both lean thinking and change management tend to approach these subjects separately. First they’ll describe the lean tools, and then they’ll go into change management theory. With The Gold Mine, we’ve tried to deal with these two themes concurrently, progressing on both fronts at the same time. This approach also addresses one of the reasons that it’s so hard to find any workable lean “recipe,” which is that the tools, or at least their level of implementation, must be linked to the management’s lean maturity. For instance, we would argue that lean is fundamentally about rigorous problem solving and involving operators in kaizen. Fine. But in most working environments, if you start there, as most TQM or six sigma programs do, you will end up with disappointing results. People will get confused about which problems to solve, how to go about change, a
