Do you ever get the nagging hunch that your department doesn’t run as efficiently as it should? Tom Baumann has a bit of advice: Go Lean.As the Lean program leader for the State of Minnesota, Baumann’s job is to “encourage, cajole and convince” 24 cabinet-level state agencies to adopt and sustain Lean principles. So far, 127 reviews of various processes have led to average savings of $80,000 per review. That’s $10 million in all, and counting.Lean leadership principles stem from Lean manufacturing, developed decades ago by Toyota Motor Corp. It’s described in Lean Thinking, a book written in the mid-1990s
