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Your Turn Getting Lean Business schools are perpetually looking for ways to improve their programs. Yet business school administrators and faculty often overlook one of the most effective: lean management.While it originated in manufacturing years ago, lean management is now part of many other industries, including nonprofit and government organizations. In these competitive times, business schools can implement lean principles and practices to reduce costs, improve quality, simplify processes, gain market share, stabilize or grow employment, create better curricula, and better sat- isfy customers. Lean management is not a new concept to business school profes- sors. They've been studying its prac- tice for years. They've taught its methods to students preparing for careers in operations, and they've written dozens of scholarly papers illustrating how lean principles and practices can be applied within a school's operations and degree pro- grams. So, if business schools know so much about the benefits of lean management, why have they been so slow to adopt it? One reason is that many people in service organizations such as higher education embrace a common bias that lean management is a "manufac- turing thing." They don't always see that the manufacturing and service industries share more similarities than differences and that lean principles apply as much to higher education as to any other industry. In fact, lean management can help them improve individual courses and degree pro- grams, enhance student services, and differentiate their programs from others in the marketplace. It's not 56 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2005 LEAN MANAGEMENT SUCCEEDS NOT ONLY IN CREATING A STRONGER CURRICULUM AND BETTER PREPARED GRADUATES— IT ALSO HELPS A BUSINESS SCHOOL CREATE A MORE FOCUSED, LONG-TERM STRATEGIC PLAN. by Bob Emiliani enough to teach lean principles and practices in the classroom. Business schools must also lead by example, applying lean management to their operations. I have studied and practiced lean management for more than decade, and I have seen it work in many dif- ferent settings. With the help of extensive training by Shingijutsu consultants in the mid-1990s, my colleagues and I learned to apply lean management principles and practices first in manufacturing shops, then in supply chains. In 1999, I became a university profes- sor in the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Hartford, Connecticut, campus. It was then that I realized there was an enormous amount of waste in all facets of higher education—the admissions process, advising, cur- riculum, degree programs, and stu- dent services. We decided to put lean manage- Bob Emiliani ment to work at Lally. We worked to simplify our programs and requirements so that students' learning objectives were more clear- ly defined. I conducted seminars for faculty on lean management, teach- ing them important lean tools such as root cause analysis. We discussed a key process for achieving continu- ous improvement and innovation known as kaizen, literally translated from Japanese as "change for the better." Faculty, staff, alumni, and senior administrators participated in kaizen to improve our executive master's of science in management degree program. We learned first- hand that lean principles and prac- tices can be successfully applied to higher education. For example, because academics