Global Kata ─ Success Through the Lean Business System Reference Model

The book that reinvents Lean for a new generation, a new global culture, and a new benchmark of success

Global Kata: Success Through the Lean Business System Reference Model? sets a new benchmark for the evolution of Lean and strategic improvement. The book and the reference model provide a detailed road map for leading, designing, architecting, implementing, and sustaining a holistic, organization-centric and culturally grounded Lean Business System. The Lean Business System Reference Model? provides the larger scale blueprint for a higher order, best-in-class, adaptive systematic process of improvement.

The reference model incorporates the leadership factors, design guidelines, systematic process architecture, best practices, and performance criteria for building a connected Lean Business System with a higher standard of behavioral alignment and cultural excellence (kata). The author provides both the advanced thought leadership and detailed implementation guidance for a higher order, enterprise-wide process of adaptive systematic improvement while integrating new Lean principles about leadership, evolving technology, innovation, transactional processes, and behavioral alignment and cultural development to create the right improvement kata thinking throughout any organization and in any country.

The author provides an excellent perspective on the current state of Lean with its focus on manufacturing tools and principles, and leads the reader through the rethinking, understanding, and integrating of all of the visible and invisible requirements for a successful adaptive systematic and sustainable management process of improvement. The Lean Business System Reference Model? provides an innovative guide for organizations to advance Lean thinking and execution far beyond the production floor, and to a new level that enables the reinvention of global supply chains, new product development, cash-to-cash, acquisition integration, and other core business processes in a highly complex and technology-enabled enterprise.

A major objective of the reference model and this book is to guide organizations away from the superficial mimicking and success-limiting scope of Lean manufacturing principles and tools from other successful organizations -- and to think, innovate, expand boundaries, and become the next global Toyota organization in their own way.

Terrence T. Burton is President and CEO of The Center for Excellence in Operations, Inc., a management consulting firm headquartered in Bedford, New Hampshire with offices in Munich. A certified Six Sigma Black Belt, he has worked with over 300 clients in his thirty years of experience, and written eight previous books on Lean, Six Sigma, and other business subjects.