Overview

Successful enterprises must not only do the job right: they must do the right job. Becoming lean, as traditionally defined, is important, but it is only part of the story. More important is to use lean concepts and approaches to create value for all stakeholders for all enterprise missions. That s the essence of our Chapter 1 principles.

Understanding value creation is not difficult, but determining the specific actions to create value can be a complex challenge, especially in a changing world. For the US Aerospace Enterprise, the end of the Cold War forced a shift from the overriding demands for performance as the primary value of aerospace products. The focus has shifted in many aerospace domains to more of a market-based standard. The rise of global competition in the commercial sector has intensified this market-driven shift. In addition, resource constraints from financial markets, from the public s reduced willingness to fund space exploration, and from the pull of the workforce to sectors other than aerospace create obstacles to value creation.

As we ve seen, the mismatch between these shifting realities and the existing institutional and infrastructure monuments further complicates matters. Government policies, legacy organizational structures, tradition, and a historical focus on hardware rather than on end user capability all stand as barriers to enterprise value creation. Simply put, the predominant approach based on mass production no longer suffices.

The lean principles and practices we put forth in preceding chapters are a powerful alternative to that predominant...