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"Lean Thinking" has dominated
product development and project management for over a decade.
Now, however, a six-year study by MIT's International Motor
Vehicle Program led by Michael Cusumano and Kentaro Nobeoka
finds that, in order to dramatically improve product portfolios,
Toyota and other leading companies are moving beyond single-project
management on which lean thinking is based. In Thinking
Beyond Lean, Cusumano and Nobeoka show that single-project
management can produce isolated hit products and "fat"
designs that contain few common components and many unnecessary
parts and features. As a result, in this era of slowing
growth and falling profits, leading companies are maximizing
their investment by utilizing a groundbreaking concept the
authors call "multi-project management." Drawing
on a data base of 210 automobile products and detailed case
studies from Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Honda,
Mazda, Renault, and Fiat, the authors demonstrate how product
development teams can share engineers and key common components
but retain separate designers to maintain distinctive product
features. The result: multi-project management has brought
these companies huge savings in development and production
costs.
Cusumano and Nobeoka's findings will be
required reading for every company that makes more than
one product. Taking up where The Machine That Changed
the World left off, Thinking Beyond Lean will change
the way leaders do business now and in the future.
Michael A. Cusumano is Sloan Distinguished
Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management.
A leading expert on the strategic management of technology,
Professor Cusumano is co-author of Microsoft Secrets
and the author of The Japanese Automobile Industry
and Japan's Software Factories.
Kentaro Nobeoka teaches at the Research
Institute for Economics and Business Administration at Kobe
University, Japan. He has seven years of experience as a
product planner with Mazda Motor Corporation, where he was
involved in project management teams for the RX-7, Miata,
and the 929.
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