Adopting Japanese lean practices into the Vietnamese context: Slow and steady is the sure way to go

In tandem with Vietnam’s growing economic activity in recent years is the observable trend of Vietnamese firms across various sectors increasingly adopting Japanese lean management principles and practices. Evidencing this is the ever increasing extent of lean related activity in the form of lean management and production workshops, seminars, and training and consulting activity across the nation, with the year 2013 –christened by some- as the ‘year of the lean concepts’. Whilst lean has its advantages, and with a coterie of scholars advocating that lean is an epoch making model, transferable like a technical object from any one geographic location into another and is devoid of context, there are others who advocate that the efficacy of lean –when transplanted outside of Japan- is contingent upon several contextual factors within the host nation. The extant literature on lean and on institutional transplantation reveals several cases wherein attempts to transplant the lean model into non-Japanese socio-cultural climes have resulted in outcomes ranging from minimal success to failure. This paper highlights a few contextual aspects that merit consideration by Vietnamese industries adopting lean practices, and in so doing, purports to tone down any unrealistic perceptions that managers and industrialists may harbor, about lean being a silver bullet that can overnight transform their firms into star performers.