In March 2007, Jim Womack told me about his biggest disappointment.
The Machine That Changed the World had been out for more than sixteen years, sold around a million copies, and was about to be reissued with an updated subtitle: “Why Toyota Won.” Jim was calling in from Melbourne, where he had been speaking about lean in healthcare. I asked why bother with a new edition. He answered, and then drifted toward something that seemed to have been on his mind for a while.
“The book's real job was to describe a complete business system,” he said. Product development, purchasing and supplier management, customer relations, general management, factory operations — five chapters, roughly equal weight.
“The biggest disappointment was to have people tell me it was a great book about factories.”
That was Jim's version of being wrong. The ideas held up. It was the communication he was second-guessing. He had written a book about an interlocking business system, and most readers had x`seemingly read one chapter of it. Sixteen years into a book tour that would never really end, he was still pointing at the other four chapters, trying to get people to notice them.
The rest of the book
The reissue had a funny framing. Jim called it “not exactly a product recall, but a model line enhancement.” He admitted some of what was in the original wasn't quite right. He and Dan Jones had learned things since 1990 and wanted to say so in print. This is a Womack habit that I came to appreciate over the years. He would cheerfully tell you that a thing he had said earlier wasn't right. He did not treat his own past pronouncements as sacred.
When I think about the lean world since then — all of the arguments about tools versus culture, about whether some company was or wasn't doing “real lean,” about whether “lean” had become a bad word — a lot of it traces back to Jim's disappointment in that 2007 call. People kept reading the factory chapter.
How Toyota could lose
This was 2007, and Toyota was about to pass GM as the world's largest automaker. You might have expected a victory lap from the man who had spent his career pointing at Toyota and saying: this. Look at this. Instead, for most of that conversation, Jim was laying out ways Toyota could fail.
Plants opening ahead of trained managers. Too many contract engineers who didn't grow up in the system. Suppliers in North America that weren't actually being transformed, because the Toyota Supplier Support Center was a tiny group. A dealer network Toyota had never quite managed to fix, even in its own backyard. Succession behind a generation of general managers who had been taught the hard way and were aging out.
The most memorable phrase from that list was “they could go native.” I assumed the first time I heard him use it that he meant Toyota's overseas operations might lose their Toyota-ness. He meant something more specific and more chilling. Going native, in his usage, meant regressing to mass production — the deep dark jungle, as he put it, that none of us should want to go into. Not because some other system was replacing Toyota's, but because the gravitational pull of orthodox, top-down, results-based management was always there, always easier, always ready to reclaim any organization that stopped pushing against it.
“For the short term, can Toyota screw up?” Jim said. “The answer is no. For the long term, absolutely.”
In 2009 and 2010, during the sudden acceleration recalls, a lot of what Jim had been worried about showed up in the headlines. He never came back on the podcast to say I told you so. Looking back across eighteen years of these conversations with Jim, what strikes me is how consistent his diagnosis stayed. He was already worried in 2006 that Chinese manufacturers were mistaking capital for management. He spent most of the 2007 Machine reissue episode listing ways Toyota itself might regress. And seventeen years later, after a Boeing door plug came off an airplane in flight, he was still worried about the same pattern: regression toward mass production, dressed up in modern clothes.
The A3 on your desk
In that same 2007 call, Jim described how Toyota actually manufactured a manager. You would join the company out of university. You would rotate through the business for a year — three months making cars, three months selling cars, three months in engineering, three months in some other function. Only then did your actual management education begin. And it started, Jim said, with an A3 on your desk.
The A3 was a problem. It was yours to solve. It was, by design, a problem about something you did not know anything about.
The boss did not tell you the answer. The boss did not know whether there was one answer. The boss's job was to ask questions. Why do you think this? What's the evidence? Are you sure? Go look. Come back. That was the apprenticeship. It produced, over many years, what Jim called a fully seasoned Toyota manager — someone who had been shaped by thousands of these cycles of describing a problem, going to see, envisioning a better state, figuring out what had to happen and by whom, and producing evidence that the thing had actually changed.
The reason Jim was worried about Toyota's global expansion in 2007 was not that the plants couldn't be built. It was that this apprenticeship system was, in his words, growing in small rings while the company was growing in big ones. Toyota had started bringing in outside guides — Jeff Liker's The Toyota Way, the Toyota Way Fieldbook. Jim was careful. “It's not to say anything bad about Jeff's books, which are great,” he said. “But if you're running the world's preeminent organization and you're depending on an outside guide to explain to your managers what management is, you just might be on thin ice.”
The line has stayed with me. It applies to a lot more organizations than Toyota.
“Management is hard. Machinery is easy.”
A few months before the Machine call, Jim was on the podcast talking about China. He had just been to a plant in China that was running a moving assembly line with no product on it. The workers were at their stations. The line was cranking along. About every ten minutes, something would actually come down for some of them to work on.
In most factories Jim had ever been in, people would say: well, if a thing only comes every ten minutes, we should go do something else in between. In this plant, the workers stood there. That was the job. They had been told to stand there, and that was what they did.
That is the image that made the rest of the China conversation land. These were not lazy workers. They were earnest workers operating inside a management system that had never asked them to initiate anything. Jim had seen it before. It was the reason he was going to China in the first place, and the reason the Lean Enterprise Institute had opened a Chinese Institute in Shanghai run by Marcus Chao. It was the reason, as Jim put it, that he now found himself — an American — telling Chinese managers to act like Japanese in Toyota City, because the historical animosity between Japan and China meant the Chinese couldn't easily hear it straight from a Japanese teacher.
He was annoyed, not at the workers, but at managers who kept treating capital equipment as a shortcut around the work of actually managing.
“Managers will try anything easy that doesn't work before they'll try anything hard that does. And the fact is that management is hard. Machinery is easy. You get a catalog and you buy yourself some machinery.”
The line is funny because it's precisely accurate. I have quoted it to myself about hospital IT projects more times than I can count. A new module. A new vendor. A new AI layer. It's management underneath all of it, and the new kit is the thing you buy when you don't want to do the management.
Picking the word
Jim also pushed back, gently and repeatedly, on the American excuse that lean was somehow Japanese and therefore wouldn't travel. “It's amazing how much time civilization wastes,” he said, “on the inability to separate the origin of something from the essence.” Origin is not essence. You can pick up the essence wherever you live.
He was in the room when the word “Lean” itself was coined. In our 2024 conversation, he told me the term came from John Krafcik, then an MIT graduate student, in Jim's office in 1987. They picked it deliberately to avoid an ethnic or national label.
“This wasn't Japanese manufacturing,” Jim said. “It was a better management system.”
A blog reader once wrote in asking whether Jim regretted the word, given how often “lean” got twisted into “mean.” Jim's answer was the answer of a man who has answered this question a thousand times and is not going to pretend he has a better one.
“A word is a word. You have to pick something,” he said.
The idea was always that you create more value with less of everything — less effort, less time, less space, fewer errors. “But in some companies, Lean got twisted into ‘fewer people.'” Not Jim's fault. The problem, as he put it, was not the word. The problem was managers who were either clueless or short-sighted.
Even the name had been an attempt to separate origin from essence. People still kept getting the two confused.
The healthcare turn
Jim's healthcare comments always carried particular weight for me, because I had made the jump from manufacturing into hospitals just before the podcast started. Jim was not a healthcare guy by background, but by the time we talked in 2011, he was spending real time in hospitals. He had been to ThedaCare in Wisconsin. He had been to Virginia Mason in Seattle. He was about to have us on for a conversation specifically about what he had been seeing.
What he kept emphasizing was that healthcare already had the mission piece that manufacturing sometimes had to manufacture from scratch. Nurses and doctors had entered the field to help people. They did not need to be convinced of purpose. What they needed, he argued, was a management system that stopped getting in their way.
He also noticed, early, that hospital CEOs would say the right things about respect for people and then walk out of the room and treat frontline staff as interchangeable cost centers. He was not cynical about this. He thought it was learnable, like anything else in management. But he did not soften the observation.
By our 2024 conversation, a couple of months after a Boeing door plug had come off an Alaska Airlines 737 in mid-air, Jim had compressed his healthcare critique into a single sentence.
“Toyota treats car parts better than most healthcare systems treat patients. And treats employees better than healthcare treats its staff. That has to change.”
John Toussaint has said the exact same thing, back when he was CEO of ThedaCare, that a snowblower manufacturiner (Ahrens) treated their products better than patients, when it came to flow and quality.
He wasn't delivering a sermon. He was stating a fact in the tone he would use to tell you the weather. That may be the thing I've learned most clearly from watching Jim talk in public for twenty years. He doesn't soften. He also doesn't perform outrage. He says the thing he thinks is true, and the people who take it personally are usually the people who should.
Fellow stumblers
Near the end of that 2024 episode, I thanked Jim for keeping at it all these years. He didn't accept the compliment cleanly.
“Thanks for supporting your fellow stumbler,” he said. “Like myself and the others that are listening.” Then: “I don't feel I'm nearly finished. But even when I am finished, well, there are just more people who need to get on the journey. And gradually, one of these eons, we might even get there. But it'll be a long time.”
Stumbler is a good word. It carries the right humility without being false about the effort. Jim has spent more than forty years trying to explain a system that most readers want to reduce to one of its chapters, and he has stayed patient about it in a way I'm not sure I could. The patience is part of the teaching. If the people haven't learned, Toyota used to say — and Jim has quoted to me more than once — the teacher hasn't taught.
The question I'd ask him next is the one he half-answered with the reissue in 2007. When you look at the parts of the book that weren't exactly right — not a product recall, a model line enhancement — what would the 2026 model line enhancement say? I don't think it would be about manufacturing. I think the chapter that would need the most revising is the one about general management — about how top-level managers in America actually make decisions, and whether any of the last forty years of management education has made it easier to pick up the essence that Jim keeps pointing at.
Maybe I can get him back on the podcast to discuss. What would you ask Jim?
The series continues next week with the long shadow of W. Edwards Deming.
