Lean Thinking has dominated product development and project management for over a decade. Now, however, a six-year study by MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program led by Michael Cusumano and Kentaro Nobeoka finds that, in order to dramatically improve product portfolios, Toyota and other leading companies are moving beyond single-project management on which lean thinking is based. In Thinking Beyond Lean, Cusumano and Nobeoka show that single-project management can produce isolated hit products and "fat" designs that contain few common components and many unnecessary parts and features. As a result, in this era of slowing growth and falling profits, leading companies are maximizing their investment by utilizing a groundbreaking concept the authors call "multi-project management." Drawing on a data base of 210 automobile products and detailed case studies from Toyota, Ford, GM, Chrysler, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, Renault, and Fiat, the authors demonstrate how product development teams can share engineers and key common components but retain separate designers to maintain distinctive product features. The result: multi-project management has brought these companies huge savings in development and production costs. Cusumano and Nobeoka's findings will be required reading for every company that makes more than one product. Taking up where The Machine That Changed the World left off, Thinking Beyond Lean will change the way leaders do business now and in the future. Warren Seering Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of The MIT Center for Innovation in Product Development In this worthy successor to The Machine That Changed the World, Cusumano and Nobeoka persuasively document how leading companies have achieved significant advantages by shifting emphasis from development of individual products to delivery of coordinated product streams. Readers will especially welcome the authors' efforts to evaluate practices for deploying core functional components, technical knowledge, and multi-project management capabilities across sets of development projects. Thinking Beyond Lean should be read by production, marketing, and financial managers -- in fact, anyone concerned with product development. Edward Hoffman NASA Senior Manager for Project Management Development Thinking Beyond Lean is truly a rarity -- a book which deals with the actual challenges of project management, and which will make practicing project managers and senior leaders think in new ways. Through a focus on multi-project management, Cusumano and Nobeoka provide insight into project portfolio planning, product innovation, technology transfer, and rapid development. The book provides a broad opportunity to learn how performance and growth can be dramatically improved. Daniel Roos co-author of The Machine that Changed the World Based on over a decade of research, Thinking Beyond Lean is a pragmatic, insightful examination of how companies should approach their overall product development strategy. Michael A. Cusumano is Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management. A leading expert on the strategic management of technology, Professor Cusumano is co-author of Microsoft Secrets and the author of The Japanese Automobile Industry and Japan's Software Factories. Chapter One Introduction: Beyond "Lean" in Product Development This book is about how to manage product development more strategically and efficiently. We talk about multi-project management and the benefits this kind of thinking can bring to projects and to companies. The basic idea is to create new products that share key components but to utilize separate development teams that ensure each product will differ enough to attract different customers. If possible, projects that share components and engineering teams should overlap in time so that a firm can deliver many products quickly and utilize very new technologies. The evidence we have suggests that, if they follow these principles, firms can achieve dramatic improvements in performance -- huge savings in development costs (engineering hours) as well as remarkable growth in sales and market share. The examples and data we present are mainly from the automobile industry. The ideas, however, apply to many companies that have more than one product and want to expand the number of new products rapidly and efficiently. Managers, in our view, have a simple choice: They can manage new product development as if each project and product exists in isolation -- and possibly maximize their chances of delivering something fast and producing a "hit." Or, they can view each development project as part of a broader portfolio of projects-existing in the past, present, and future (Figure 1-1). If they follow multi-project thinking, then they can try to maximize the chances that the organization will produce a stream of new products that cover a range of market segments and make the