Mark Graban beschrijft in het boek Lean Hospitals, improving quality, patient safety, and employee engagement het herkomst van de term Lean als volgt:

Origins of the Term Lean
While the concepts came to us via Toyota, the term Lean is credited to John Krafcik, part of the research team at the International Motor Vehicle Program15 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). That team, led by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, studied the global auto industry in the late 1980s, looking for practices that led to Japanese success. Through their research, they disproved their hypothesis that all Japanese automakers were doing things differently—it was primarily Toyota. The term Lean was coined to describe a system that managed to get by with half of just about everything—physical space, labor effort, capital investment, and inventory—and far fewer than half the defects and safety incidents. The term described the results, but the word has also entered the language as a description of the method. In recent years, Toyota has acknowledged that the word Lean is basically a synonym for the term they prefer, the Toyota Production System.16 If people in your organization react negatively to the word lean, that invites a conversation about what the Lean methodology really is, or it creates an opportunity to give it your own label, such as “loving care” or “the The Care Improvement System.”

Bron: Lean Hospitals, improving quality, patient safety, and employee engagement - Mark Graban