Draws conclusions for the future of the industry in the USA.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Lean Thinking was launched in the fall of 1996, just in time for the recession of 1997. It told the story of how American, European, and Japanese firms applied a simple set of principles called 'lean thinking' to survive the recession of 1991 and grow steadily in sales and profits through 1996. Even though the recession of 1997 never happened, companies were starving for information on how to make themselves leaner and more efficient. Now we are dealing with the recession of 2001 and the financial meltdown of 2002. So what happened to the exemplar firms profiled in Lean Thinking? In the new fully revised edition of this bestselling book those pioneering lean thinkers are brought up to date. Authors James Womack and Daniel Jones offer new guidelines for lean thinking firms and bring their groundbreaking practices to a brand new generation of companies that are looking to stay one step ahead of the competition.

The Toyota Way Fieldbook is a companion to the international bestseller The Toyota Way. The Toyota Way Fieldbook builds on the philosophical aspects of Toyota's operating systems by detailing the concepts and providing practical examples for application that leaders need to bring Toyota's success-proven practices to life in any organization. The Toyota Way Fieldbook will help other companies learn from Toyota and develop systems that fit their unique cultures. The book begins with a review of the principles of the Toyota Way through the 4Ps model-Philosophy, Processes, People and Partners, and Problem Solving. Readers looking to learn from Toyota's lean systems will be provided with the inside knowledge they need to Define the companies purpose and develop a long-term philosophy Create value streams with connected flow, standardized work, and level production Build a culture to stop and fix problems Develop leaders who promote and support the system Find and develop exceptional people and partners Learn the meaning of true root cause problem solving Lead the change process and transform the total enterprise The depth of detail provided draws on the authors combined experience of coaching and supporting companies in lean transformation. Toyota experts at the Georgetown, Kentucky plant, formally trained David Meier in TPS. Combined with Jeff Liker's extensive study of Toyota and his insightful knowledge the authors have developed unique models and ideas to explain the true philosophies and principles of the Toyota Production System.

Make Your Business a Lean Business is a written by business leaders for business leaders as a how-to guide to building enduring market leadership. Written by authors with more than 60 years’ experience applying Lean to operations and businesses, this book will allow readers to understand Lean principles and apply practices to transform their business. It also Shows readers how to transform their business to a Lean business using Lean philosophy, values, practice, and tools Is a comprehensive Lean Enterprise Operational Management System implementation guide that defines the Lean Enterprise Business Model Uses personal author experiences throughout the book to illuminate and reinforce concepts and practices Provides insights and a roadmap so executives can take immediate action to start building a Lean business Readers will be able follow a logical path aligning their business from strategy to detailed activity, thereby engaging their entire organization in becoming more competitive. It is the only true enterprise book about applying Lean to the entire business, and it provides business leaders with the understanding, approach, and tools to plan, align, and transform their business starting with their core business value proposition, business planning, disciplined goal and resource alignment, and implementation management.

In my last semester of graduate business school, I was trying to understand exactly what the business curriculum taught when I stumbled onto the business discipline of "Lean." From that point forward my thinking went sideways. I expected that during the business program I might have an "AHA" moment - an "AHA" moment synthesizing the entire degree into an overarching insight explaining how all business subjects led to making money. For comparison, in law school, that "AHA" moment for me was a sudden, intuitive sense of who, why, what, and how we regulate people, businesses and society. From business school though, I expected a singular understanding of the money making process. However, when I ran into the popular business concept of "Lean," I realized that while I was taught the specific details of how money got made generally from all business activity, business school taught me nothing about the creation of "true-north value," which money ought to represent and "Lean" advocates pursuing. There is a difference. I realized that while all business subjects allude to and try to quantify "value," none fully described the genesis of "true-north value" in the way "Lean Thinking" suggests, which is helpful to know when leading a business toward creating the type of value for which customers willingly pay a price. I knew I had some extra-curricular work to do to graduate with the knowledge of true-north value applied to business that I was seeking. My business education then became a quest to understand the historical and philosophical foundation of "Lean" and apply it in my own life and business dealings. As I became more educated about the history of Lean, it became for me a unique synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophies used to reach measurable business results. Thus, in this text and through a close reading of others, I summarize and extend the intellectual legacy of Lean to its philosophical extreme, unifying everything from theoretical physics to the humanities to religion by further intertwining Lean like a golden braid within the themes that form the bedrock of all true-north value. Thus, you might find U/P to be an intellectual companion and counterpoint to all that has been written regarding Lean. Through this research and writing process, this book evolved to become simultaneously academic, literary and artistic. It became academic because I tried to not only write truly, but to support it copiously with legitimate, well-researched footnotes. I consider it literary because its symbolism requires that it actually be read to be fully appreciated. And it to me became artistic because I could only articulate true value in the space where words fade away, and that sense of the unspeakably sublime that I felt started coming out in the writing methods I used. The fission, fusion, parallelism, coherence and discoherence of its language began to model for me the physics and metaphysics of Lean. It became an abstract meditation on all busy-ness - a transcendent business book. I sincerely hope and expect that you will enjoy and learn from it as much as I have writing it. Thus, my purpose in writing this book is both ego-centric, in that I wrote it for my own entertainment and benefit, and allo-centric, in that I sincerely hope to pass on what I consider useful knowledge to you about the intellectual history and philosophy of Lean and business in general. By reading this book, I expect that you will learn a bit about history, a bit about philosophy, a bit about business, and a bit about yourself, which may be like rebuilding a ship you are already on, as the philosopher Otto Neurath famously said. However, by studying this intersection of "Lean," "Business," and "Philosophy," I hope that you will become more powerful throughout your life's journey.

U/P: Lean Business Philosophy, uses Lean as a paradigm to explain the source of true-north value that organizations produce. Lean is a hybrid of Western and Eastern traditions used by leading companies worldwide to make money, and following it will lead you to true-north value too. U/P takes Lean to the highest point so you will surely know how to delight consumers for the greatest profit of all.