The chairman and CEO of Lean Enterprise Institute Inc. believes his most enduring legacy to the manufacturing world is the "opportunity to play a role in one of the greatest experiments in the last 50 years." He is referring to the partnership between Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Co. in creating NUMMI in 1983. "We are still learning today from that venture," Shook says.
Shook's life mission has been to spread the principles of the Toyota Production System and lean manufacturing. His passion about lean arose during his decade-long career with Toyota in Japan and the United States. He became the company's first American kacho (manager) in Japan. The Lean Enterprise Institute describes Shook as "a true sensei."
He has served as general manager of planning and administration for Toyota's engineering center in Ann Arbor, Mich., and was the senior U.S. manager at the Toyota Supplier Support Center in Lexington, Ky. An industrial anthropologist with a bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee and a master's degree from the University of Hawaii, Shook is the former director of the University of Michigan's Japan Technological Management Program. He is also a graduate of the Japan-America Institute of Management Science.
His Shingo Prize-winning book "Learning to See," which he co-authored, helped introduce the world to value-stream mapping.
Shook also co-authored "Kaizen Express," a bilingual manual of the essential concepts and tools of the Toyota Production System and "Managing to Learn," in which he describes the A3 management process at the heart of lean management and leadership.
His excitement over the potential of this continuous-improvement strategy to produce profound results has not changed over the years. "Lean will continue to spread as a philosophy and move into the creative segments," Shook predicts. "It will be applied in areas that directly affect customers. The system will be used to provide customers with what they want when they want it."
Rather than the latest management fad, says Shook, "Lean, which has demonstrated robust staying power, is still going very strong."
