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Rating: 
Summary: A Violation of Lean Principles
Review: In this book, as well as "Office Kaizen: Transforming Office Operations into a Strategic Competitive Advantage," William Lareau provides some of the rudimentary tools and theories of Lean practices. However, both books fall seriously short of providing the comprehensive, straight-forward lean techniques and philosophies that both management and their employees require to introduce, improve and sustain lean processes over the long-term. In short, I found that his books actually violate Lean principles in that they contain hundreds of pages of "Munda" (waste)!Lareau correctly argues that for any business to successfully integrate a Lean program into its structure, it needs to develop and sustain overwhelming employee acceptance and involvement in the program. Unfortunately, Lareau's psychological foundations for his theories on human motivations are outdated. Much has been revealed in the field of psychology in the past 15-20 years with which Lareau clearly needs to acquaint himself. Lareau makes repetitive attempts to motivate the reader to his way of thinking through tiresome war characterization analogies and often unfounded attacks to minimize or discredit past business improvement programs and their proponents in favor of his own. He attempts to develop and reinforce the belief that Lean requires such levels of training and business restructuring, that the reader must conclude that to successfully implement and sustain Lean, they must invest heavily and for a lengthy duration, in an outside Lean consultant. His books are essentially marketing tools for his own consultant firm. Incidentally, this book lacks both an index and a bibliography. Perhaps Lareau finds that citing his sources and crediting the specific works of others are an unnecessary inconvenience.
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