Let Us Not Think of Lean as a Cost-Cutting Endeavor

There are organizations today that are branding cost-cutting efforts as Lean thinking. In talking to a chief financial officer (CFO) of a leading consumer goods company, he told me that his team had embarked on a Lean effort. I was impressed to hear a CFO and not an operations leader talking about Lean. On probing, I realized what this company was doing was cost cutting and not Lean.