Companies around the world boast about the results they have achieved from their lean programs. Yet despite all the lean projects that have been implemented over the past two decades, no company in any industry in the world has attained the same level of consistent operational excellence in its field as Toyota has. What are these companies missing? The answer is leadership with the right skills and knowledge to teach and coach others to use disciplined approaches to process improvement.  In The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership (with Gary Convis, former Toyota managing officer) we present a leadership development model and use examples from Toyota to illustrate the patient painstaking process of growth of leaders from developing themselves, to developing others, to leading daily kaizen and finally maturing to aligned goals from top to bottom and sideways using hoshin kanri (policy deployment).

Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and President of Liker Lean Advisors. He is author of the international best-seller, The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer, 2004 (26 languages, over 950,000 copies sold), and has coauthored nine other books about Toyota including Toyota Culture, The Toyota Product Development System, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership (2011) and Developing Lean Leaders at all Levels: A Practical Guide (2014). In 2016 he published The Toyota Way to Service Excellence and coauthored a lean transformation business novel called Trenches. His articles and books have won twelve Shingo Prizes for Research Excellence. In 2012 he was inducted into the Association of Manufacturing Excellence Hall of Fame and in 2016 inducted into the Shingo Academy.