Book excerpt: Creating Lean Corporations utilizes a bottom-up approach in which the employees who perform tasks are empowered to create and manage their own portions of the business process. Each task is defined using a task model that indicates the input-output relationships between tasks. This approach is essential for creating and improving business processes that are large and complex. This lean approach was successfully applied at a major automotive manufacturing company and was awarded the Charles F. Boss Kettering Award for technological innovation in 2000. This book is for business process managers (especially lean leaders) who seek to reengineer their business processes using lean principles.