Lean Enterprise Institute CEO John Shook Joins Summit on “Manufacturing’s Next Chapter”
Cambridge, MA, February 7, 2013 – Lean Enterprise Institute CEO John Shook today will address “Manufacturing’s Next Chapter,” a business summit bringing together experts from business, government, and labor to deliberate the impact on industry of powerful trends in technology, insourcing, workforce development, and global competitiveness.
The program features interviews and panel discussions with a range of industry leaders, including Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE; Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Chair of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship; Neil Gershenfeld, Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; and Thea Lea, economist and Deputy Chief of Staff at the AFL-CIO. In back-to-back interviews, Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and John McCain (R-AZ) will discuss immigration’s impact on the future of the American workforce.
Shook, an expert in the application of lean management, will join a panel discussing “What Advanced Manufacturing Requires to Keep Advancing.”
The Atlantic magazine organized the conference, which is being underwritten in part by GE. The event, which runs from 9:30 am-6pm (Eastern) at the Newseum in Washington, DC, is being live streamed at http://events.theatlantic.com/manufacturings-next-chapter/2013/. Virtual attendees can join the conversation on Twitter using #AtlanticMFG.
In ““The Insourcing Boom,” the cover story of the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic, Shook said that the inability to see the “total costs” of moving operations out of the U.S. led companies to make poor decisions about offshoring. The realization that there is more than the offshore labor rate to consider when deciding where to make products is leading many companies to relocate operations back to the U.S., he said.
About John Shook
Shook learned about lean management while working for Toyota for nearly 11 years in Japan and the U.S., helping it transfer production, engineering, and management systems from Japan to NUMMI and subsequently to other operations around the world.
He is the author of Managing to Learn and co-author of Learning to See and Kaizen Express. His article “How to Change a Culture: Lessons from NUMMI”; Sloan Management Review, January 2010, won Sloan’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize for outstanding article in the field of organizational development. He is the former director of the University of Michigan, Japan Technological Management Program, and served on the faculty of the university’s Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering.
What is Lean?
The terms lean manufacturing, lean production, or lean management refer to a complete business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, customer relations, and the overall enterprise. It requires less capital, material, space, time, or human effort to produce products and services with fewer defects to precise customer desires, compared with traditional modern management.
Toyota pioneered lean management as a complete business system after World War II. During the late 1980s, a research team headed by James Womack at MIT’s International Motor Vehicle Program coined the term “lean” to describe Toyota’s system.
About the Lean Enterprise Institute
Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., was founded in 1997 by management expert James P. Womack, PhD, as a nonprofit research, education, publishing, and conference company with a mission to advance lean thinking around the world. We teach courses, hold management seminars, write and publish books and workbooks, and organize public and private conferences. We use the surplus revenues from these activities to conduct research projects and support other lean initiatives such as the Lean Education Academic Network and the Lean Global Network. Visit LEI at https://www.lean.org for more information.
Contact: Chet Marchwinski
Lean Enterprise Institute
617-871-2930
cmarchwinski@lean.org