..".valuable insights for people interested in understanding how systematic problem solving applies to the kinds of problems that product development managers need to solve..." "-- Journal of Product Innovation Management"

."..valuable insights for people interested in understanding how systematic problem solving applies to the kinds of problems that product development managers need to solve..." "-- Journal of Product Innovation Management"

""The Lean Machine" serves best as a set of tips for the project manager, but executives can also benefit from Oosterwal's wisdom when they are trying to build a top-performing team of product developers or engineers." --"Houston Business Journal"

"[Oosterwal] gives business leaders insight on supporting innovation and shows them how their companies can consistently excel at developing innovative and profitable products and still keep employees motivated, energized and always learning." --"Biztimes Milwaukee"

"The author uses a friendly, conversational approach....The lessons provided are universal and helpful for any company needing a resurgence." --"APICS Magazine"

Like many celebrated companies, Harley-Davidson has soared, faltered, nearly died, and come back to life as a robust, iconic institution. And like all enduring companies, it learned that the constant push to improve and innovate is essential for staying on top--and even for staying in existence. "The Lean Machine" is an intriguing, behind-the-scenes account of Harley-Davidson's remarkable post-bankruptcy growth period, spurred largely by radical improvements to its product development processes. As director of product development, author Dantar Oosterwal was instrumental in applying lean principles to the realm of product development (principles made famous by Toyota's vaunted production system). The result was the highly efficient and effective "Knowledge-Based Product Development"--a revolutionary system that reduced development time by half, and quadrupled new product development throughput. Combining a probing, nuanced examination of the product development process with a sweeping systems approach to understanding its full scope and impact on an organization, "The Lean Machine" traces the evolution that the Harley-Davidson product development team underwent as it moved to its breakthrough process of cadence, flows, and set-based designs, stopping along the way to: - Explore the far-reaching effect of "firefighting," which funnels huge amounts of time, money, and human resources into fixing last-minute problems. - Pinpoint the hidden problem of "False Positive Feasibility," which dooms many projects developed with common phase-gate processes. - Explain the remarkably practical, low-tech oobeya process for visually documenting targets, objectives, and workflow. - Uncover the powerful results achieved by building product development on a foundation of planned, experiential learning cycles. - Make a persuasive case for adopting a "combat planning" approach to product development, which is better suited to turbulent conditions. Packed with actual data, true stories, and engaging, first-person narrative, "The Lean Machine" gives you deep insights and reliably effective strategies for using Knowledge-Based Product Development to radically improve your own systems, developing more new products in much less time--and with predictably excellent results. Dantar P. Oosterwal has led global innovation improvements as vice president of innovation at Sara Lee and as director of product development at Harley-Davidson. Dantar holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a master's degree in Management from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. He lives in Batavia, Illinois.