An organization organized around ‘pull’ and flow needs a very different kind of leadership from the traditional command-and-control where decision-making is distant from the work and based on abstracted measures, budgets and plans. Because of the emphasis on the system rather than individuals, however senior, descriptions of the TPS use the words ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ sparingly. Here leadership consists in making it easier for others to achieve mastery and to work with the system to improve it rather than to make heroic changes. The hard truth is that such a conception of leadership is so opposed to what most people have learned, and the archetype of central command is so strong, that many fail to make this step. For leaders, the learning challenge of moving to a systems view is sometimes brutal. Systems thinking requires a profound shift in thinking about the design and management of work, reversing current norms to go from ‘push’ to ‘pull’ and placing the development of workers, individually and collectively, at its heart