Lean Leadership: The Gateway to Competitiveness

The easing of restrictions on global trading is a good thing from the customer's perspective, but it has put immense pressure on organisations to remain both profitable and competitive. This pressure has spawned a confusing number of approaches to gaining that competitive advantage. Lean is one such approach and this paper compares Lean to two other approaches: Organisational Learning (OL) and the People Capability Maturity Model (P-CMM). It will attempt to show that all three approaches are paths in the right direction, but without a radical change in leadership and management behaviour, all run the risk of grinding to a halt as soon as the initiative's sponsors move on.