The workbook that made value-stream mapping accessible to lean practitioners. Published by the lean-enterprise-institute, 1999. Won the Shingo Research Award in 1999.
Mike Rother and John Shook (a former Toyota manager and the first American kaizen manager at Toyota in Japan) guide the reader through creating current-state and future-state value stream maps for a product family. The title "Learning to See" captures the core insight: most organizations cannot see waste because they have never mapped the actual flow of materials and information. Value stream mapping makes the invisible visible — revealing how much of total lead time is spent waiting (one of the seven wastes) rather than being processed. It became one of the lean movement's most widely used practical tools.