Q A A number of us here at MIT worked on this research and debated what was the right term to describe these management practices we saw at Toyota. John came up with the term ‘lean.’ Today, he is CEO of Google’s automobile self-driving subsidiary, Waymo. At that time (1988), John published a companion article to mine (on Japanese manufacturing innovations) in the MIT Sloan 6 Management Review called ‘The Triumph of Lean.’ That started the whole thing. Since then, lean has been applied to everything under the sun. But the original idea was doing roughly the same amount of work in terms of having the same number of outputs or products, with much leaner staff. A book that came out in 1990, The Machine That 7 Changed the World [by the three co-directors at the time of MIT’sInternational Motor Vehicle Program, James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos] documented that the Japanese car makers were assembling cars in less than half the time the U.S. manufacturers were—12 hours vs. 25 hours. 6 MIT Sloan Management Review, Triumph of the Lean Production System, Volume 30, Fall 1988, accessed March 15,2018, https://www.lean.org/downloads/MITSloan.pdf 7 Amazon, The Machine That Changed the World, 1990, accessed March 15, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/ Machine-That-Changed-World-Production/dp/B007ZHTZ8Y#reader_B007ZHTZ8Y