Book Review: A Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean - Lessons from the Road
I won't always be reviewing books this frequently but this one has been sitting around the house for awhile and I thought this would be a good chance to get it read.
This isn't a new book. It was published in 2006. But it's one of the widely read books and author Jamie Flinchbaugh has been making a name for himself. He posts regularly at Evolving Excellence and I've always liked what he says there. (Full Disclosure: I don't know Jamie Flinchbaugh but he recently joined a LinkedIn discussion group I started.)
The book is very nicely structured. Each chapter focuses on a topic and the authors explore five components or ideas related to that topic. For example, Chapter One...Think First: Five Principles of Lean; Chapter Two...People Need Leadership, Not Management: Five Leadership Moves for Lean....and so on, The other chapters explore lean pitfalls, lean transformation roadmap, lean operating systems, lean accounting, lean material management, lean service, and personal lean. The "five points" format helps in understanding and retaining the authors' main ideas.
One doesn't need to read the chapters in order. In fact, I'd recommend that you read Chapter Four (Transformation Roadmap) and Chapter Five (Operating Systems) first. The material in the first two chapters will be familiar to anyone for whom this is not the first thing they've read on lean. (If this is your first book on lean, I'd still recommend reading Chapters Four and Five then read Chapters One and Two.) The other chapters can be read in any order one likes.
The reader won't get a manual of instructions for implementing lean. Nor will the reader get detailed (or any, for that matter) descriptions of lean tools. If you don't know what 5S or quick change is all about before you start the book, you won't learn it here. But that's not what the authors are going for. The reader will get a solid grounding in relevant concepts and thinking, within which later reading on tools and methods will make more sense. As to the concepts and ideas presented by the authors, they're on the mark, well presented, fairly well explained (although, see paragraph below). As with most lean texts, there's a bit more emphasis on waste removal as an end in itself...but just a bit. They duly emphasize the importance of flow, to my lights, the most important concept within lean.
One might think a book carrying a subtitle "Lessons from the Road" would contain lots of....lessons from the road, i.e., stories about real organizations to illustrate the authors' points. Well...not so much. The authors do a lot of "talking about" their points but, quite often, I felt the need for an illustration or an example. A few are forthcoming, but just a few.
Is the book worth reading? Yes, definitely. You won't come away feeling that you know how to get a lean initiative started next week within your own organization, but you should come away feeling as though you have a good grasp on more than a few important lean concepts and principles.
This isn't a new book. It was published in 2006. But it's one of the widely read books and author Jamie Flinchbaugh has been making a name for himself. He posts regularly at Evolving Excellence and I've always liked what he says there. (Full Disclosure: I don't know Jamie Flinchbaugh but he recently joined a LinkedIn discussion group I started.)
The book is very nicely structured. Each chapter focuses on a topic and the authors explore five components or ideas related to that topic. For example, Chapter One...Think First: Five Principles of Lean; Chapter Two...People Need Leadership, Not Management: Five Leadership Moves for Lean....and so on, The other chapters explore lean pitfalls, lean transformation roadmap, lean operating systems, lean accounting, lean material management, lean service, and personal lean. The "five points" format helps in understanding and retaining the authors' main ideas.
One doesn't need to read the chapters in order. In fact, I'd recommend that you read Chapter Four (Transformation Roadmap) and Chapter Five (Operating Systems) first. The material in the first two chapters will be familiar to anyone for whom this is not the first thing they've read on lean. (If this is your first book on lean, I'd still recommend reading Chapters Four and Five then read Chapters One and Two.) The other chapters can be read in any order one likes.
The reader won't get a manual of instructions for implementing lean. Nor will the reader get detailed (or any, for that matter) descriptions of lean tools. If you don't know what 5S or quick change is all about before you start the book, you won't learn it here. But that's not what the authors are going for. The reader will get a solid grounding in relevant concepts and thinking, within which later reading on tools and methods will make more sense. As to the concepts and ideas presented by the authors, they're on the mark, well presented, fairly well explained (although, see paragraph below). As with most lean texts, there's a bit more emphasis on waste removal as an end in itself...but just a bit. They duly emphasize the importance of flow, to my lights, the most important concept within lean.
One might think a book carrying a subtitle "Lessons from the Road" would contain lots of....lessons from the road, i.e., stories about real organizations to illustrate the authors' points. Well...not so much. The authors do a lot of "talking about" their points but, quite often, I felt the need for an illustration or an example. A few are forthcoming, but just a few.
Is the book worth reading? Yes, definitely. You won't come away feeling that you know how to get a lean initiative started next week within your own organization, but you should come away feeling as though you have a good grasp on more than a few important lean concepts and principles.
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