Philip Holt

Lean organisations seem to work in a simple manner and operate with an innate calmness. They have removed much of the complexity that inhibits the performance of other companies, but achieving this level of simplicity is not easy. In The Simplicity of Lean, Philip Holt provides a comprehensive handbook of the Lean principles, presented in an accessible and easy to apply manner.

The Simplicity of Lean is a step-by-step guide to the Lean Thinking that makes your organisation more efficient and effective. The book offers the necessary context of how to apply Lean Thinking to make your Lean Transformation successful. Alongside the theory and the practical application of Lean, Philip also shares his personal insights and experiences, as well as individual success stories (and failures) from various Lean leaders from across the world.

The Simplicity of Lean is the perfect guide to make your Lean journey a resounding success.

Philip Holt is Senior Vice President, Global Transformation, at GKN Aerospace and a Board Member of the Operational Excellence Society. He studied Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University and Management at the Wharton School of Pennsylvania and the University of Warwick, was an engineer at Gillette and led the Lean Deployment worldwide at Philips for over twelve years. He achieved Lean Master status and has summarised his 30+ years of experience and insights into Lean Leadership in his previous book Leading with Lean and his most recent book, The Simplicity of Lean.

Philip Holt is Head of Operational Excellence, Accounting Operations at Philips, and tells us exactly what Lean Leadership is, how we can learn to apply it and how you can convince the workplace never to settle for anything less than excellence.

We also learn how to redefine our leadership style and how to identify and eliminate wasteful activities within the company. This way you can recognize, realize and retain the ideal situation. In Leading with Lean, Philip Holt shows us the best ways to arrange a high-performance organization and gives us simple tools and insights for each leader to aspire to greatness, for themselves and for their teams.

In Leading Lean by Living Lean, Philip Holt details and explains what is probably the most important part of becoming a Lean Leader -- living and practicing what you preach. To do this you must believe in what you’re doing, understand what it means and what you need to do, and do it every day. The author, through his engineering background, has fully embraced the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model of Deming / Shewhart but has adapted David Bovis’ Believe-Think-Feel-Act (BTFA) model to understand why logic and facts are very often not the principal players in the game of change.

In this book, Holt author describes how you can take both the PDCA and BTFA models into account and has sectioned the book into three prime parts:

1. Head -- How you learn and understand the Lean principles and their application.
2. Hands -- How you practice Lean Leadership daily.
3. Heart -- How you internalize and believe in Lean Leadership.

Through this book, you, the Lean practitioner, whether aspiring or experienced, will have everything that you need to “lead it,” “do it,” and “live it.”

The nature of this book is more “why to” than “how to” – the author knows that he cannot tell you how to lead, do, or live Lean; he can only explain why it is so important and share his knowledge, experiences, failures, and successes. This book isn’t so much a self-help book as a self-reflection book and it can point you in the proper direction, but… the book won’t change you; only you can change you!

Essentially, with this book, the author wants those who think of Lean as a toolkit, who believe that Lean can be project managed, or who argue about Lean versus Six Sigma and misunderstand the fundamental depth of impact that true Lean Leadership has on an organization to be disabused of any or all of those notions. This book is aimed at those leaders who seek to experience the full transformative effects of Lean in their organizations and want to practice it at the principle level of deployment. Holt's aim is to help business leaders enhance who they are by changing what they do and the way that they do it