ABSTRACT
Lean leadership is the skill of achieving goals by developing people. ‘‘Lean,’’ to a large extent,
remains an attempt to generalize Toyota’s unique management method to other companies and
other fields-from healthcare to start-ups. From the start, leadership has been central to Toyota’s
management worldview. When Eiji Toyoda, the architect of the Toyota we now know,
described the evolution of Toyota’s management perspective he did so by highlighting the
contribution of individual leaders who shaped the company by the systems they developed:
Kiichiro Toyoda’s just-in-time system, Shotaro Kamiya’s sales system, Masao Nemoto and Hanji
Uemata’s total quality control system, Taiichi Ohno’s kanban system and so on. For his own
contribution, Eiji Toyoda repeatedly highlighted the suggestion system: the efforts made to get
improvement ideas out of every employee, and thus offering everyone the opportunity to lead
in their role (Shimokawa and Fujimoto, 2009).
