The practices that we call lean management today were originally laid out in Taiichi Ohno’s seminal work, Toyota Production System.8 Ohno had worked his way up through the ranks of Toyota, starting out in the Toyoda family’s loom business and, prior to World War II, moving into the startupToyota Motor Company.8 The Toyota Production System (TPS) was born out of necessity, as post-war Japanese economic growth demanded a greater variety of goods than could be economically produced using mass production because of the significantly diminished domestic market and devastated infrastructure.