THE LEAN AND HAPPY HOME

Lean at Home came about as Eva's family struggled to survive modern life with two fast-paced professional jobs and three school-aged children. Overcome by stress, and drawing on her professional experience with Lean in healthcare and business, Eva and her family began using the Japanese Lean organizational method in their home. They began working with Lean tools and philosophy systematically, untangling their everyday lives and improving their family time in the process. And so, Lean@home was born. They quickly found the benefits included a significantly decreased environmental footprint, less wasted time, more rediscovered space and resources and, importantly, a reclamation of both personal and family priorities for a life well lived. Today Eva's focus and professional energy are aimed at spreading the concept around the world. She regularly give workshops and lectures for groups of 50-500 people.

Streams, or processes, is a basic concept of Lean — everything from the dinner stream, recycling stream, homework stream to the morning stream. Every home is full of streams and many of them are messy and time-consuming. The magic of Lean at Home is that one picks the exact streams that need to change, decides how to implement that change in either small or big steps, then institutes it. Both books, the first through text and charts and Simply Living through gorgeous images and illustrations offer readers the tools to identify their own areas of waste in space, time, or money.

Eva Jarlsdotter was born in the countryside in Sweden. She began her career as a journalist. After almost a decade in journalism, she left to work internationally in leadership roles in business. She has held positions in communications, corporate social responsibility and branding in the telecom and pharmaceutical industries. In the summer of 2011 she resigned from her position as vice president in an international telecom company. She currently works as a writer, consultant, and lecturer. Eva holds a degree in journalism from the University of Gothenburg and an executive MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics. She lives in Stockholm with her husband and their three children in an old house with an apple orchard. She dreams of one day growing enough vegetables and fruits to be self-sufficient and she genuinely hopes and believes that this generation of ours will end poverty and climate change. To do this we have to start with the organization that we can impact the most - our homes. Eva is regarded as the pioneer of the concept lean@home.