This entry represents a category of secondary sources rather than a single work: the cluster of retrospective analysis produced around 2013–2015 to mark the 25th anniversaries of john-krafcik's "lean" coinage (1988) and the publication of machine-that-changed-the-world (1990). The sources in this category include video series, interview collections, and reflective essays from the lean practitioner community.
Known Sources in This Category
Gemba Academy video series (approximate, unverified): Gemba Academy — a lean practitioner education platform — produced video content around the anniversaries, including interviews with lean practitioners reflecting on the Machine's impact. Specific titles, dates, and URLs are not documented in this KB.
LEI retrospectives (approximate, unverified): The lean-enterprise-institute produced retrospective content for its own institutional history and for the anniversary of machine-that-changed-the-world. Whether this took the form of published articles, website content, or event programming is not documented.
krafcik-lean-production-origin: Mark Graban's 2013 Lean Blog post on the 25th anniversary of Krafcik's coinage is the best-documented specific source in this cluster.
Why This Category Matters
Anniversary retrospectives are valuable as historical sources for several reasons:
1. They capture how the lean community understood its own origins at a moment of deliberate reflection — not just in passing references but in focused retrospective analysis.
2. They often include testimony from early participants who are otherwise difficult to reach in print: practitioners who were present at IMVP plant visits, early readers of the Machine, or managers who first attempted lean implementations in the early 1990s.
3. They reveal how the lean-codification-era's core claims — that lean was universally applicable, that mass production was obsolete — were assessed after 25 years of implementation experience.
Research Gaps
This entry is a stub. Major gaps: