LEAN PRODUCTION - How to Use the Highly Effective Japanese Concept of Kaizen to Improve Your Efficiency will appeal to both a general self-help audience, as well as those with business and manufacturing interests. It provides specific techniques and behaviours to improve our effectiveness and packages them into an easily understandable philosophy of reducing waste in our lives. The system described in this book has been used very effectively in manufacturing in Japan for over forty years. Those who have come into contact with it invariably and almost naturally adopt it to their personal lives. This book will assist self-helpers who wish to improve their inner peace or, less spiritually, show entrepreneurs, managers and employees how to hone that corporate edge; so essential in today's highly competitive global marketplace. Author, Jim Thompson, served as Personnel Director for the GM Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac Central Office. He studied lean production systems first-hand, as a member of the General Motors Technical Liaison Office (TLO) with NUMMI (a GM/Toyota joint venture) in Fremont, California. After fourteen years with General Motors, he became Vice-President of Human Resources for the Walker Manufacturing Company, a division of Tenneco. He is currently President of In