Following in the footsteps of foundational Lean books such as Lean Thinking (Womack and James, 1996), Pascal Dennis takes a creative approach to explaining Lean process improvement ideas and how to apply them in various business areas outside of production such as marketing and service delivery. The book tells the story of fictional character Tom Papas as he promotes and implements Lean ideas and practices at the New Jersey Motors Manufacturing.

The result is a very human (and at times humorous) approach to Lean that stands out from many other books on the topic that are more theoretical and less applied in nature. The Remedy covers the core concepts in Lean such as increasing value and minimizing waste, which are not difficult concepts to understand, but by looking through the eyes of Tom Papas and his successes and challenges the reader is able to appreciate a crucial aspect of Lean, which is that the ideas are far easier to understand and explain than to implement.

Another strength of this book is the cartoon-style conceptual diagrams as shown in the example below (The Remedy, p.4). We find many of these diagrams are great visual aids in PowerPoint slides or print materials on Lean projects (including proper citation of course!).