James P. Womack is the founder and president of the Lean Enterprise Institute a non-profit educational and research organization chartered in 1997 to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking. The Institute is conducting a series of research activities to create a tool kit of methods for implementing lean thinking in a wide range of industries. The Institute also sponsors a series of educational meetings through the year and helps people to apply lean thinking in entirely new applications such as health care, construction, and distribution.

The intellectual basis for the Institute is described in a series of volumes and articles co-authored by Dr. Womack over the past twenty years. The most widely known of these are The Machine That Changed the World (1990), Lean Thinking (1996), From Lean Production to the Lean Enterprise, Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1994, and Beyond Toyota: How to Root Out Waste and Pursue Perfection, Harvard Business Review, September-October, 1996.

Dr. Womack received a B.A. in political science from the University of Chicago in 1970, a master's degree in transportation systems from Harvard in 1975, and a Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1982 (for a dissertation on comparative industrial policy in the U.S., Germany, and Japan). During the period 1975-1991, Dr. Womack was a full-time research scientist at MIT directing a series of comparative studies of world manufacturing practices.

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