A Few More Thoughts: On Management and Leadership

A Few More Thoughts is a collection of five critical essays, a polemic, and a research paper that tie up the loose ends of a decades-long career practicing and studying progressive management. Rather than another round of Lean cheerleading, it takes on the uncomfortable problems that most promoters avoid and gives practitioners valuable new analyses.

This book helps readers by:

• Reframing Deming’s Teachings. Resolves the long-standing puzzle of why Deming's celebrated "Seven Deadly Diseases" and "14 Points" have had so little influence on top leaders. What reads as wise advice from a progressive-management view looks like a direct threat to status, rights, privileges, and autonomy from the classical-management view, which is why executives quietly ignore it.
• Warning Against Jumping to Solutions. Explains why the same problems keep recurring in organizations, exposing the irony that Lean advocates prescribe progressive management without first understanding the problem – the very "jumping to solutions" they warn everyone else against – and shows how overconfidence and oversimplification push complex problems into quick, band-aid fixes.
• The Life of a Lean Professional. Survey results validate the frustration and isolation of Lean practitioners by drawing on interviews with mid-career professionals, surfacing the real costs of the work: being organizational "oddballs" (henjin), transient employment, and burnout when top leaders stay committed to the status quo.
• Improving the Kaizen Process. Explains how kaizen outside Toyota has barely evolved in decades and shows what a results-producing, industrial engineering grounded process actually requires.
• Overcoming Division Between Lean and Labor Unions. Unpacks the fraught, mostly missed relationship between Lean and organized labor. Explains why executives spend lavishly to resist unions to protect control, why unions treat Lean as a wedge issue and confuse it with harmful "Fake Lean" (Continuous Improvement without Respect for People), and why workers and progressive management could be natural allies if Lean is practiced so as to do no harm to people.
• Improving How Lean is Promoted. Diagnoses why the Lean movement has failed to displace classical management after nearly four decades of effort, tracing it to a flawed founding premise ("top leaders want Lean"), a lack of creativity in how Lean is promoted, and calling for a fact-based reset that engages workers, unions, and society instead of staying inside a self-referential bubble.
• Clarifying the Real Purpose of Leadership. Challenges the unexamined preconception that everyone agrees what leadership is for, contrasting followers' view (service) with leaders' actual purpose (preserving their own interests and the status quo), and exposing a gap that puts much of the $150-billion leadership-training industry into question.

Written by an insider willing to say what others won't, this is a demanding, sometimes provocative book aimed at experienced practitioners rather than newcomers looking for encouragement. For readers who suspect the usual Lean narrative isn't telling the whole story, it offers clear-eyed analysis of the problems that actually hold progress back.