Lean Thinking

Building on their study of Toyota, James Womack and Daniel Jones distilled lean production into a set of principles any organization can use: define value from the customer’s point of view, map the value stream, and relentlessly eliminate waste. Full of real company turnarounds, it became a cornerstone of operations management. Its ideas about efficiency and flow inform how Amazon runs at scale, and Jeff Bezos placed it on the company’s executive reading list.