Beyond Lean

Your dashboard is green. Why are you losing ground?
Efficiency is up. Audit scores are up. Kaizen events are on schedule. And the competitive gap is widening.
For thirty-plus years, Lean was the answer. It worked - within the conditions it was designed for. Those conditions have moved, and the toolkit has no mechanism for telling you so.
Ramiro Villeda helped build the translation of the Toyota Production System for Western industry. He defended the first doctoral study of Just-in-Time under variability in the Americas, with Shigeo Shingo among his advisors, and spent three decades implementing Lean across five continents. This book is his account of what he found when the envelope ran out.
What the West imported was not TPS.
It was Stage One: the visible practices, stripped of the engineering that produced them. Buffers sized by variability became "inventory is waste." A calculated kanban count became "reduce the cards." Standard work as a testable hypothesis became a compliance document. The tools crossed the ocean. The reasoning did not.
That is why improvement programs plateau, why gains regress, and why the answer is never a better version of the same thing.
And AI will not fix it either - not the way it is being used.
General Motors spent five billion dollars on robots in the 1980s and placed them exactly where the workers had stood, changing nothing else. Market share fell from 46 percent to 35 percent across the decade. Meanwhile NUMMI, with almost no automation, became one of GM's best plants. The error was never the technology.
Beyond Lean sets out what comes next: twelve biases to unlearn, four traps that keep the cycle running, and a method for using a large language model as a thinking partner rather than an expensive mirror - a way to frame a question so your own operating data produces a finding your organization cannot defer.
Written for the leader who has to decide.
If you run Manufacturing or Operations, have delivered what was asked, and have noticed that something is not adding up, this book gives you the questions your training never provided - and a way to make your own data argue for you.