Back in the '80's, Schonberger wrote the book on World Class Manufacturing.  If James Womack hadn't come along with "Machine That Changed the World", I think Schonberger would be known as the top operations improvement guru.

Here's a good article at another blog by Schonberger. 

I'm going to write a post re: my thoughts on how I think lean is going to fade because managers just don't get it.  They think it's all about waste reduction and cost cutting.  Schonberger gets at this in the article.