James Womack self-effacingly claims to be a megaphone for the smart people who figured out a better way to manufacture cars and run a company. But some say he has the power to change the world. And they point to his influence on them personally, their companies, and the manufacturing industry.
"I am positive, but for James Womack, that I would have gone out of business six years ago," states Matthew Lovejoy, president of aluminum castings manufacturer Lovejoy Industries. "He taught me to see."
Indeed, Womack has educated most of the manufacturing workforce on lean.
"You can trace every consulting company and practitioner back to him," says David Alschuler, principal at Industry Directions. "Now lean is widely accepted as a philosophy of how you manage your business processes."
Womack coined the term "lean" to describe the Toyota production system that has helped catapult the company to the top in automobile sales worldwide. In a study of the world's automakers in the mid-1970s, Womack and fellow MIT researchers Dan Roos and Dan Jones recognized Toyota's uniqueness and continued to study its production and management methods. In 1990, they described those "lean" practices in a book, The Machine that Changed the World. That machine also changed Womack, who made lean his life's work.
Womack founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in 1997 as a non-profit training, publishing, conferencing, and management research organization dedicated to promoting lean concepts.
"Jim, along with Dan Roos and Dan Jones, brought lean to the attention of the manufacturing public," Alschuler says. They understood that the principles could be applied anywhere "if companies were willing to change their processes and thinking. They saw that the barriers were institutional."
Changing people's thinking is what Womack does. He calls himself a "practical social philosopher." In an interview with Managing Automation, he explains: "I look at what people can do to make work more creative and help customers solve their problems. Once you've pinpointed the right problem, you can set up processes and find ways to sustain those processes."
When he sees someone going down the wrong path, he says, "I try to remind people of things that don't work."
Donald Runkle has experienced Womack's candor firsthand. Runkle instituted lean principles at Delphi in the 1990s, when he was vice chairman and CTO. "Womack has good, clear, sound thinking. It was useful to have him talk to our organization. He said we weren't as good as we thought we were," Runkle says. He is now chairman of EaglePicher, where he is starting to deploy lean principles.