The work of leaders in a lean management enterprise

Lean management creates enormous value, but improvement that’s truly continuous is often elusive. Innovation in fields such as digital and IT make it more urgent, achievable, and human.

We asked five executives with decades of experience in lean management about the most important lessons they learned in helping their organizations sustain continuous improvement.

When combined, digital innovation and operations-management discipline boost organizations’ performance higher, faster, and to greater scale than has previously been possible.

Two senior executives from the global bank describe their recent journey.

Even as organizations assemble digital building blocks for the long term, they also need short-term, pragmatic moves that meet customer expectations and protect core businesses today.

Each company’s path to a new operating model is unique. But successful transformations are all constructed with the same set of building blocks.

RPA is a promising new development in business automation that offers a potential ROI of 30–200 percent—in the first year. Employees may like it too.

To keep its performance improving, an enterprise must keep its management system improving, too. A regular, rigorous cycle of assessing itself reveals actions that help make the system more mature.

Transforming an organization’s performance usually means changing its culture—and that means its leaders must change how they lead.

Continuous improvement at scale—across a whole enterprise—requires management discipline at scale. At a few organizations, digital innovation is helping managers make a daily habit of good discipline.

An auto-industry veteran describes how rededication to lean-management principles—especially to fostering leadership at every level—led his organization to new performance breakthroughs.

Providing good service has never been easy. Meeting rising customer expectations requires companies focus on building the capabilities their people need to make full use of their talents.

The fast pace of change in financial services can whipsaw frontline employees. One bank has responded with a new approach that makes change easier and faster for people to absorb.

Improving operations and client experience in B2B organizations is hard because they rely so heavily on highly skilled experts. But those experts can also be the source of a solution.

One law firm’s story shows how lean management can transform even the most complicated, tradition-bound, and intellectually demanding of businesses.

Lean management is about much more than cost reduction, making it a powerful set of disciplines for increasing purchasing’s effectiveness.

An HR leader describes how an effort to increase his bank’s efficiency meant challenging the bank’s culture—and himself.

Three executives at one of the world’s most unusual mining operations describe how even in a highly unpredictable context, lean management improves not just productivity, but also how people lead.