READING NOTE · UPDATED 2026
Define Lean through the problem you are solving
A definition of Lean is useful when it helps people see value, waiting and learning in the same system. It is less useful as a badge for a team or a reason to cut resources indiscriminately. Read the original explanation below, then make the system boundary and the customer outcome explicit before deciding what to improve.
A practical next step
- Name the person or group receiving the outcome.
- Trace one item from request to usable result.
- Choose a delay or defect to investigate with evidence.
This 2026 reading note is written by the Durnall editorial team. Richard Durnall’s original text follows below.
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Source capture · 2008-04-10 ↗I think this is a question on the minds of a lot of people in the IT industry at the moment. The Lean operations community have been on their journey longer than we have in IT and from my experiences at Lean 2008 I think that they are starting to really understand what Lean is all about.
So, what is Lean?
Well, it’s a set of tools (JIT, 5S, 5 Why’s…), it’s a production system, it’s a product development system, it’s a business model, it’s a mentality of continuous improvement, it’s about the ruthless elimination of waste.
Right?
I don’t think so. Of course it is all of those things but today I tend to look at these elements as symptoms of what Lean is really all about; a leadership philosophy for business and life focussed on getting the most out of people.
I’m not going to try and describe what I mean by this becasue I think Konosuke Matsushita, the founder and president of Matsushita Electric (the parent company of Panasonic, Technics and other famous brands), put it much better than I ever could in his speach to visiting European and American managers in 1979….
“We are going to win and the industrial west is going to lose: there’s nothing much you can do about it, because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves. Your firms are built on the Taylor model; even worse, so are your heads. For you, the essence of management is getting the ideas out of the heads of the bosses into the hands of labour. We are beyond the Taylor model : business, we know, is now so complex and difficult, the survival of firms so hazardous in an environment increasingly unpredictable, competitive and fraught with danger, that their continued existence depends on the day-to-day mobilisation of every ounce of intelligence.
For us, the core of management is precisely this art of mobilising and pulling together the intellectual resources of all employees in the service of the firm. We know that the intelligence of a handful of technocrats, however brilliant and smart they may be, is no longer enough. Only by drawing on the combined brain power of all its employees can a firm face up to the turbulence and constraints of today’s environment.”
Is your organisational philosophy about getting the ideas of the managers into the hands of the people or about empowering the people to lead the company?
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” Shakespeare - Julius Caesar.