Daniel T. Jones is an English author and researcher. He won the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence in the Research and Professional Publication category multiple times for his books The Machine that Changed the World, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Organization and Seeing the Whole: Mapping the Extended Value Stream.
He is also the founder of the Lean Enterprise Academy.
He has a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Sussex. In 2015 he received an honorary Doctorate of Science from the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom.
Daniel Jones along with James P. Womack researched the automotive industry. Their research work with Daniel Roos, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the automotive industry, found a three-to-one productivity difference between Japanese and American factories. Their research was published as a book, The Machine That Changed the World in 1991.