From its manufacturing origin, the lean concept has been widely disseminated into services, including public services. The term “lean service” first appeared in Bowen and Youngdahl (1998) to describe how the tools and principles being derived in a manufacturing setting were applicable in a service context. There has since been an increase in the interest in lean service both in practice and in literature, with contributions now being published in top operations management journals (e.g., LaGanga, 2011).

It is evident that lean production variations have been applied by a wide array of private companies as well as public and third sector organizations in countries worldwide. Janoski and Lepadatu (2014) have even noted that lean is becoming a dominant division of labour, replacing gradually Taylorism and Fordism. We take this notion as the starting point in this chapter and examine the diffusion of lean and some other forms of work organization in Europe and the USA.

The above quotation by Charles Darwin is particularly relevant to the telecommunications sector, especially producers of mobile phones. The leading companies in this field have been changing in recent decades, even from year to year. Two decades ago, Ericsson, Nokia, and Motorola enjoyed total domination of the mobile phone market, having over 80 per cent of the market share, and Nokia was the largest phone company as a result of its customer focus and innovative solutions.

Healthcare is the least safe industry in the world today. In the USA alone over 200,000 patients die from medical error each year (Makary and Daniel 2016). This is the third leading cause of death. This true crisis in healthcare is the burning platform for a new management method. The lean method. Multiple healthcare case studies have shown that organizations managed through lean thinking produce better quality results. Further, preliminary data suggest some positive associations between lean implementation and selected one year lagged performance measures such as lower Medicare Spending per Adjusted Beneficiary and higher Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) done by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services of all hospitals in the USA (Shortell and Rundall 2018).

This chapter lays out the some of the basic aspects of how corporations identify and aggregate the preferences of their constituents. Unlike democratic political institutions, corporations restrict voting rights to one class of constituents – shareholders – when it comes to electing members of the board or authorizing major transactions. The remaining constituents – employees, creditors, customers, and suppliers – are limited to expressing their preferences through contracts with the corporation. The chapter concludes by exploring this corporate governance structure through three controversial issues – the system of one share, one vote; proxy access; and say on pay – to illustrate the fierce debates within corporate law as well as the creative possibilities permitted by the corporate form.

In 1930 the founder of Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, Toyoda Sakichi, instructed his eldest son, Toyoda Kiichirō, to research the auto industry with a view to entering it. In 1933, Kiichirō announced that the company would begin making cars, stating: “We shall learn production techniques from the American method of mass production. But we will not copy it as is. We shall use our own research and creativity to develop a production method based on our own country’s situation” (quoted in Ohno 1988: 91). That situation included a small market that could not justify huge volumes with dedicated machinery, coupled with severe resource constraints. Their goal was to develop a production system based on lower volumes with low inventories. Toyota didn’t implement its first compete just-in-time system until 1958 and was not able to fully debug its kanban (continuous flow) system until 1962, after which it was adopted companywide (Tolliday 1998).

In the 1980s and even some part of the 1990s, perceived and real differences between the Japanese socio-cultural, institutional, and economic environment and that of the countries experiencing a wave of Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) led to a plethora of academic research (Carrillo and Abo 2014). The principal focus was to identify the different set of core competences of competitive Japanese companies, especially Toyota, transferred in foreign countries. What finally emerged from some of the most notable research efforts was to clarify the necessity of applying and adapting the Japanese-style business practices to the managerial conditions in host countries (Kenny and Florida 1993; Abo 1994; Itagaki 1997; Babson 1998; among others).

In the preface, we set the stage for the rest of the book. Corporations have a tremendous amount of power and play a major role in a number of contemporary issues, including income inequality, global warming, and the financial crisis. The principal theory of corporate governance – shareholder primacy – is well entrenched in law and practice, but its intellectual foundations are falling apart. Academic groups are split into different camps advocating for more or less shareholder empowerment. The traditional, law and economics arguments for the core governance feature – the exclusive shareholder franchise – have been revealed to rest on faulty assumptions and flawed reasoning. And both corporate governance theorists and corporate and economic luminaries are openly questioning the stability of shareholder primacy as a continuing regulatory norm. There are, however, a dearth of alternative approaches, so shareholder primacy lumbers on toward the point of crisis. It is time to assess where we are and offer a new way forward.

Since the publication of a seminal book, The Machine that Changed the World (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990), lean production has received much attention from numerous researchers and practitioners. Operations Management (OM) studies have greatly increased knowledge on how organizations can successfully implement lean systems, including the Just-in-Time (JIT)/Kanban system (e.g., Monden 2011; Mackelprang and Nair 2010), process improvement programs (e.g., Glover, Farris, Van Aken, and Doolen 2011; Brunet and New 2003), and supply chain management (e.g., Wilhelm, 2011; Bruce, Daly, and Towers 2004). While lean production has been one of the central themes among OM studies (Holweg 2007), this topic has hardly been examined in the Management Theory (MT) literature. This chapter aims to fill this gap by bridging between lean production and MT, and hopes to encourage a larger number of researchers in this field to join the discussion of lean production.

Hyundai Motor Company (hereafter HMC) is a “Cinderella” case of the global auto industry, in that it has shown strong growth from a Korean small domestic automaker in South Korea (hereafter Korea) to one of the major contenders in the global auto markets over the past decades. The history of HMC, which started its manufacturing operation to assemble American-designed cars (i.e., the Ford Cortina CKD) for local consumption, has since exemplified a success story of transforming its fortunes “from rags to riches” (Wright et al. 2009). Since 2010, the Hyundai Motor Group, comprised of HMC and Kia Motor Company (KMC), has been ranked among the global top five automakers, both in terms of production volume and sales units worldwide (Song 2017).

The first publications on lean production and the evidence of the competitive advantage Japanese companies held over German competitors (Womack et al. 1990) shocked the German automotive industry of the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading to difficult discussions within companies, trade unions and the academic community about the future development of production systems. While some of the actors pushed for radical change and the adoption of lean production, others pointed out specific conditions in Germany that made directly adopting Japanese models impossible (Turner/Auer 1994; Streeck 1996). The watchword of these latter contributions was “Japan kapieren, nicht kopieren” – understand Japan, but do not copy it.

It’s May 27, 1997. The Internet has been open to the public for six years. Linux is six years old. Amazon is three. Google doesn’t exist. The dotcom bubble hasn’t happened.