Having codified Lean in print, james-p-womack and daniel-t-jones spent the decade from 1997 to 2007 building the institutional infrastructure to carry it forward. Womack founded the lean-enterprise-institute (LEI) in 1997; Jones founded the lean-enterprise-academy (LEA) in the UK in 2003. The era culminates in the September 2007 charter of the lean-global-network (LGN), which formalized a coalition of 30+ lean institutes worldwide and named jose-ferro's Brazilian institute as a third founding pillar alongside LEI and LEA.
The Lean Enterprise Institute (1997)
The lei-founding in 1997 was Womack's decisive transition from academic researcher to movement builder. LEI was established as a nonprofit with a mission to extend lean knowledge beyond the auto industry and into every sector that creates value through a sequence of activities — which is to say, every industry.
LEI became the primary publisher of lean practitioner literature. Its most important early publication was learning-to-see (1998/1999), a workbook by mike-rother and john-shook that gave practitioners a concrete diagnostic tool: Value Stream Mapping. value-stream-mapping was not invented by Womack or Jones — Rother and Shook developed it through their Toyota experience, and Womack's LEI published and distributed it. This pattern — LEI as the dissemination platform for Toyota-derived knowledge — characterized the institute's role throughout this era.
learning-to-see won the Shingo Prize in 1999 (see shingo-prize-awards), cementing LEI's standing as the canonical lean publisher.
The Lean Enterprise Academy
daniel-t-jones founded the lean-enterprise-academy in the UK in 2003. The LEA served a parallel function to LEI but with a distinctly European, and increasingly British public-sector, orientation. Jones's healthcare focus — applying lean thinking to the UK National Health Service — developed primarily through the LEA. The lean-thinking-for-nhs work grew out of Jones's LEA engagements.
Key Publications of the Era
Three writings define the era's intellectual output:
learning-to-see (1998/1999) — Though authored by mike-rother and john-shook, not Womack or Jones, this LEI publication was the era's most practically influential work. It operationalized value-stream-mapping as the central diagnostic tool of lean practice, giving every factory manager a way to visualize and analyze their value stream without needing deep TPS expertise.
seeing-the-whole (2002), co-authored by Womack and Jones, extended value stream mapping beyond the individual plant to the extended enterprise — the full supply chain from raw material to customer. The concept of the "extended value stream" pushed lean thinking toward systems-level analysis. The book won a Shingo Prize (see shingo-prize-awards).
lean-solutions (2005), also co-authored by Womack and Jones, marked a shift in focus from production to consumption. The lean-consumption concept argued that companies optimized their production processes while systematically failing their customers — that the same waste-elimination logic applied to how customers consume products and services, not just how companies produce them. This was an early signal that lean would migrate into service industries and eventually healthcare.
The Lean Global Network Charter (2007)
The lgn-charter in September 2007 was the formal culmination of the institution-building effort. By 2007, lean institutes had been founded in Brazil (jose-ferro's Lean Institute Brasil), Australia, India, and across Europe. The LGN charter formalized these relationships and established a governance structure for the global network.
The three founding figures — Womack (LEI, North America), Jones (LEA, Europe/UK), and Ferro (Brazil) — represented both the geographic reach of the network and the model through which lean knowledge was being diffused: not through a single centralized institution but through a federated network of nationally rooted institutes, each adapting lean principles to local industrial and cultural contexts.
The Practitioner Turn
A defining characteristic of this era is that Womack and Jones's own writing became more practitioner-oriented and less academic. lean-solutions reads more as a business argument for customers and executives than as a research report. LEI's publication list during this period was dominated by workbooks, toolkits, and case studies — materials designed to enable doing, not just understanding. This shift reflected the institutional mission: LEI existed to help organizations implement lean, not to study it.
Gaps and Uncertainties
The precise organizational structure of the LGN — whether it had formal bylaws, membership fees, or a secretariat — is not documented in available sources. The number of institutes at LGN founding (reported as "30+" in some sources) requires verification. Jones's activities between the publication of Lean Thinking (1996) and the LEA founding are not well-documented in this KB.