A novel about Lean Manufacturing? Not as strange as it may sound. After all, Lean visionary Frank Gilbreth, who, together with his wife Lillian, and Frederick Taylor, is credited with inventing time motion studies, wrote the somewhat fictionalized memoir "Cheaper by the Dozen." It was nothing like the recent movies....
A few years ago, we heard of a science fiction novel on Lean and ISO.
Today, the Lean Enterprise Institute released a free, if less than tantalizing, mp3 of Chapter 1 from The Gold Mine, a novel about Lean Manufacturing that won the Shingo Prize in 2006.
Click here to download the file and more resources (you can even download diagrams from the book---which is probably why we're talking Shingo, not Pulitzer here...) But if you're looking for unusual listening material on your drive home, or to work, why not check it out? You can, of course, buy the book....and, yes, the study guide to the book.
AMS
