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Vol 32 - No 01 - February 2006 News and views: Is your Lean too mean? An empirical study The tide of opinion towards Lean as a stand-alone continuous improvement device is turning. Lean and its forerunners have been pursued in the UK to a point where failure for many to enjoy the seductive benefits has been questioned, debated and researched and a second-wave of understanding has emerged and is starting to be accepted by business leaders. Research into the factors contributing to Continuous Improvement (CI) failure is not new (for example, see Jager et al, 2004 ; Gallear & Ghobadian,2004 ; Tennant & Warwood & Chiang, 2002 ; Warwood & Roberts 2004 ), which begs the question ‘Why has it taken so long for practitioners to catch-on?’ One answer to this is that much of the research points to organisational culture as being one of the reasons for failure, and for many business leaders, organisational culture is either too ‘fluffy’, or too amorphous to begin to tackle. Page number: 11 Word count: 1000 Related Topics: Continuous improvement
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