"The Power of Purpose, Process, and People" with speaker Jim Womack

Dear Laurence,

Please join us for the free webinar "The Power of Purpose, Process, and People" with speaker Jim Womack, Founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute. This one hour event takes place live on May 1, 2008 at 2:00 EDT (18:00.UTC). This webinar is based upon his keynote address at the 2008 Lean Transformation Summit held recently in Orlando, FL.

To register, please go to: http://www.lean.org/events/ppp_may_2008_webinar.html

Thank you,
Josh

Joshua Rapoza
Director of Web Operations
Lean Enterprise Institute

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About the presentation:
Everyone seems to be looking for the latest…the latest technology, the latest lean tool, the latest keys to competitiveness. But experience has shown that the key to sustaining lean as a business system is to focus on the constants, NOT the fads. Just as Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD) are performance measures that apply to every organization over time, there are constants that determine whether any management system is indeed lean.

• Does the organization have a clearly agreed Purpose built upon creating customer value?
• Are there precisely specified Processes in place to achieve this purpose? And how lean are they?
• Are People engaged and aligned with organizational purpose and dedicated to creating lean processes to achieve it?

Jim Womack, the Chairman and Founder of LEI will provide an update on the Institute’s continuing efforts to identify the components of a Lean Management System and the necessary leadership behaviors to support it. This webinar is based upon his keynote address at the Lean Transformation Summit held in Orlando in March, 2008.

You’ll learn about:

• Doing the “Big Gemba Walk”
• Determining just how lean a process is…at any level of the organization
• How to engage people in lean thinking and doing throughout the organization
• The organizational toolbox for lean managers
• The attributes and actions of lean leaders
• The lean leadership “checklist”

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About the speaker:

James P. Womack , Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute

Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute, a nonprofit education, publishing, conference, and research organization chartered in August, 1997, to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based on Toyota's business system.

The intellectual basis for the Cambridge, MA-based Institute is described in a series of books and articles co-authored by Dr. Womack and Daniel Jones over the past 20 years. The most widely known books are: The Machine That Changed the World (Macmillan/Rawson Associates, 1990), Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster, 1996), Seeing The Whole: mapping the extended value stream (Lean Enterprise Institute, 2001), Lean Solutions (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Articles include: "From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise" (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1994), "Beyond Toyota: How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection" (Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996), “Lean Consumption” (Harvard Business Review, March-April, 2005).

The Institute conducts research activities in a wide range of industries to create a tool kit of methods for implementing lean thinking and the necessary leadership behaviors. The Institute also sponsors educational meetings, workshops, senior management seminars, and conferences through the year and helps people to apply lean thinking in manufacturing and entirely new applications such as healthcare, retail, air travel, and distribution.

Dr. Womack received a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970, a master's degree in transportation systems from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1982 (for a dissertation on comparative industrial policy in the U.S., Germany, and Japan). During the period 1975-1991, Dr. Womack was a full-time research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices. As research director of MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program, Dr. Womack led the research team that coined the term "lean production".