Toyota Doesn’t Call It Lean? Its Own Websites Say Otherwise

Somebody says it in the comments of nearly every post about Lean, usually with a few exclamation points.

“Toyota doesn't call it Lean!”

It gets offered as if it settles the matter.

I've said a version of it myself. Talking with Don Kieffer on Episode #540, I said, “Toyota doesn't call it lean. They may begrudgingly acknowledge that a lot of the world refers to TPS as lean.” The first sentence is defensible. Internally, Toyota says TPS. It's their system. They named it, and nobody should expect them to rebrand it.

“Begrudgingly” is the part I'd take back. I don't think the evidence supports it.

What Toyota's Own Pages Say

Toyota Motor Europe has a page for the Toyota Production System. Directly under the H1, the subhead reads: “Our world-famous lean manufacturing system.”

Their words, on their own site. Note the “our.”

The paragraph below says Toyota's way of making vehicles is defined by TPS, “what is often called a ‘lean' or ‘Just-In-Time' system.” The next section header on that page is “Lean manufacturing system.”

Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK uses the phrasing Toyota has leaned on for years: TPS is a way of making things “that is sometimes referred to as a ‘lean manufacturing system' or a ‘just in time (JIT) system'.”

That isn't just one regional marketing team's wording. Nearly identical wording appears in Toyota Motor Corporation's own Sustainability Data Book, still hosted on global.toyota: “Toyota's vehicle production system is a way of ‘making things' that is sometimes referred to as a ‘lean manufacturing system' or a ‘Just-in-Time (JIT) system,' and has come to be well known and studied worldwide.”

I cited an earlier version of that TPS page in the third edition of Lean Hospitals, based on the language Toyota published in 2015. The current global page has been rewritten and no longer includes the phrase, which is fair enough. Companies edit their websites. But the language is still live on multiple Toyota properties, including Toyota Material Handling Europe, which opens flatly: “The Toyota Production System is a lean manufacturing system.”

Toyota UK Sells a Seminar Called “A Lean Approach”

This is the part the objection has the hardest time explaining.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing UK has a top-level navigation item on its website labeled “Lean approach.” Click it and the page headline is “A Lean Approach.” They run Lean Approach Seminars at the Burnaston plant in Derby, with dates currently posted for later this year.

The cost is £1,100 per delegate. Proceeds go to their Charitable Trust.

Their own description of who should attend: leaders “whose organisations are embarking on a lean transformation journey and want inspiration on how a Lean Approach can make a difference to quality, competitiveness and engaging your workforce.”

A company trying to distance itself from a word doesn't usually put it in the navigation menu, the page title, and the product name–and then charge admission.

Why the Word “Lean” Exists at All

Jim Womack walked me through the naming back in 2007, on Episode #24.

In 1987, the MIT team had the plant data and could see that something was different. They needed a name for it. “Japanese manufacturing” was wrong, because the difference wasn't national. “Toyota Production System” didn't work as a general label either — as Jim described it, they thought other Japanese automakers were succeeding with similar approaches, and there was the obvious practical problem. Ford was never going to launch an improvement effort named after Toyota.

The discussion kept circling back to “less.” Less time, less effort, less capital, less space, fewer defects. John Krafcik, a young researcher on the team, said, “Let's call it Lean.”

The whole point of the word was that it could travel. It described performance instead of a nationality or one company's brand. It was built to be the generic term for what Toyota was doing, so everyone else could use it without adopting a competitor's name.

Jim's own caveat was that “Lean” rhymes with “mean,” and plenty of managers heard it as headcount reduction. As he put it, once the rocket leaves the launch pad you can't control its trajectory. I wrote more about the origins of the term and how it got misunderstood last year.

Former Toyota Leaders Named Their Program “True Lean”

This is the data point I think matters most.

In 1994, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky partnered with the University of Kentucky to build a program that would teach TPS to organizations outside Toyota. It's still running. The coaches are former Toyota leaders, described on their own site as “many of whom were among Toyota's first North American Management.” They still maintain a relationship with Toyota. The two celebrated 30 years together in October 2024.

They call it True Lean.

They didn't call it “Not Lean.” They kept the word and put a qualifier in front of it.

The university later named its Department of Engineering Technology for former Toyota president Fujio Cho. It also offers a bachelor's degree in Lean Systems Engineering Technology.

I think that name tells us where the disagreement actually sits. The issue isn't whether “Lean” is a permissible word. It's that much of what carries the label doesn't resemble what those leaders learned inside Toyota.

That's my position too.

Why “Toyota Doesn't Call It Lean” Misses the Point

When somebody drops the line into a comment thread, I don't think they're making a claim about Toyota's website copy. They're frustrated, and the frustration is earned. I've seen kaizen events scheduled on a calendar with no daily improvement in between, 5S audits with scores attached and no management system underneath, and layoffs announced with the word Lean in the press release. If you spent years learning from Toyota and then watched that happen, you'd want distance from the word too.

But it's a complaint about fidelity, not vocabulary. The complaint is legitimate. The argument attached to it isn't.

Changing the label doesn't fix the fidelity problem. An organization can call it TPS, rename it the Acme Business System, or call it Operational Excellence, and still be doing tool deployment with no leader standard work, no problem-solving capability, and no appetite for hearing bad news.

Cho himself, in a 1993 speech, referenced The Machine That Changed the World approvingly and raised no objection to the term. At least in that speech, his concern wasn't the label. It was interpretation–people copying what they could see instead of learning how to think.

If the Word Bothers Your Organization, Change It

I've written before that if people in your organization react badly to “Lean,” you have two choices. Talk about what the method actually is, or give it your own name. ThedaCare called theirs the ThedaCare Improvement System. One hospital in The Netherlands called it “loving care.”

Naming is cheap and occasionally useful.

What I'd rather argue about is whether team leaders exist and have time to respond when someone signals a problem. Whether managers go and see the work. Whether anybody got punished the last time somebody stopped the line, literally or otherwise.

Toyota charges 1,100 pounds a head to walk visitors through Burnaston under a banner reading “A Lean Approach.” Whatever internal debates Toyota has had about the word, its UK operation is comfortable selling a seminar under that banner. I'm more curious about what those visitors see on the shop floor–and how much of it they can actually take home.