James Womack, 2009 IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame Inductee
For a generation of managers, James Womack represents the Marco Polo of lean, bringing back from Japan reports of a more efficient way of manufacturing products and now-familiar terms such as kaizen, kanban and poka-yoke.
Womack received a bachelor's in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970, a master's degree in transportation systems from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1982.
From 1975 to 1991, Womack was a research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices. Womack led the research team at MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program that coined the term "lean production" to describe the Toyota Production System.
He is the co-author of such influential bestsellers as "The Machine That Changed the World" and "Lean Solutions." He founded the Lean Enterprise Institute in 1997.
Today, he is busy spreading the lean message to all sectors of the economy and helping companies make the leap from simply employing lean tools to instituting "management systems that can every day, month after month, year after year, deploy these tools and get the results you should be getting."
