Lean principles are the guiding rules to follow on your Lean journey. Perhaps the most famous come from James Womack and Daniel Jones’ book Lean Thinking.

Lean Thinking’s Lean Principles:

1. Specify value
2. Identify the value stream
3. Establish flow
4. Implement pull
5. Seek perfection

While these traditional Lean principles are effective for the actual technical application of Lean, they don’t address the human side of Lean. For that, we at Velaction add in the following Lean principles:

Velaction’s Lean Principles:

1. Respect people
2. Lean requires partnership
3. Leaders lead by example
4. Focus on the WIFM principle
5. Grant authority to make changes-and mistakes

You’ll notice that these Lean principles all tie into employee engagement. Lean can be pushed from the top with moderate success, but the best Lean companies have engaged employees pulling Lean when they have a problem. And they won’t do that if they are not vested in the company’s Lean success.

Velaction offers a great deal of materials, both free and for purchase, that follow these Lean principles. I encourage you to look around to see how we can help.

We’ve got three great places to start:

1. Look at our Products and Service pages to see all we offer.
2. Look at our Lean Dictionary to get a feel for how we think.
3. Sign up for our Lean Lessons of the Day to get to know us while you build up your knowledge in small doses.