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INDIE BOOK REVIEW

Indie Book Reviews Verdict (4.7/5): In LEAN METAPHYSICS: PHILOSOPHY FOR BUSINESS, Benjamin Snipes works to build an intellectual paradigm for using Lean business management principles as the basis for a life philosophy. The resulting treatise is not for beginners, but fellow Lean adherents will find a home in its pages.

LEAN METAPHYSICS by Benjamin Snipes builds a theoretical grounding and an expansive paradigm for devotees of Lean business management. Rather than explain the tools of Lean management or provide a précis of Lean transformation, however (work that Snipes leaves to the many other books on the subject), Snipes works to underpin Lean--its precepts, its doctrine, and the reverberations of its implementation-- into an exploration of Lean's theoretical underpinnings, which crosses many disciplines.

What is Lean? Since at least the 1980s, when Toyota began to dominate the car manufacturing industry, businesses have sought to emulate what has become known as the "lean management" style Toyota implemented through Toyota Production System. This management style depended on a systemic and fully integrated customer-oriented re-visioning of a business's purpose, process, and its people. In that sense, it's neither simply a model nor a set of methods. It's a business's transformation toward what is called "true-north value": the maximalization of customer value and minimization of any-/everything extraneous to that value.

In LEAN METAPHYSICS, Benjamin Snipes builds out the normative undergirding Lean, including and especially what it is that constitutes true-north value. Snipes therefore organizes the book by value streams, a schema that allows for a paradoxically rigid but relatively free-form examination of what defines a value stream, what determines its particular power, and how it can contribute to Lean business.

For example, "Value Stream 2: Money & Economics," discusses money's "existential and physical value" through lessons in economics, a series of loose case studies, and several market-based examples depicting the ways that value shifts or becomes relative (particularly vis-à-vis consumer perspectives). Ultimately, the value stream-based discussion considers the ways that Lean valuation both accommodates and exploits the limitations of price (for example) to more efficiently denote customer-perceived value and to therefore contribute to a business's true-north value.

Due in part to Leanism's ontological aspirations--it imagines an all-encompassing way-of-being for life and business--a Japanese-inflected lexicon communicates much of Lean's doctrine. While many practitioners eschew this usage, Snipes embraces it, offering a Lean Lexicon in the book's first pages. This is the perhaps clearest tell that this book is not for beginners. In fact, it's not even for intermediate practitioners. LEAN METAPHYSICS is for advanced and perhaps impassioned devotees. Readers who are not only familiar with Lean principles but who are comfortable speaking Lean language will find much to mull over here.

~Molly Gage for IndieReader

SYNOPSIS OF KEY IDEAS BASED ON LEAN

We all live within a lean, “ontological teleology,” which is the innate objective of further being and becoming more -- a condition we have been unwillingly thrust into since birth. Darwinism is a specific, biological example of the ontological teleology. The overall goal of the ontological teleology is both self-defining within the universe (the “ontological medium”), and possibly for something beyond existence based upon what people believe without common agreement, such as religion.  

If we bracket out this speculation, we can see the ontological teleology most clearly across all gradations of life and existence. Existence along these gradations forms degrees of lean, true value. Value can be broken down three ways into that which is universal, process, or personal in nature. Life is created at the point that the universal and process values successfully interact and adapt within the universe to perpetually energize and reproduce. Cognitive and conscious organisms develop the personal type of lean, true value. The mixing of these three value types across the gradations thus creates levels of existence that lean up on top of one another, from raw matter to microorganisms, human beings and corporations.  

For businesses to improve their operations and results the most, they must look at the ontological factors that customers and stakeholders depend upon to adapt, reproduce and energize, and optimize those ontological factors with the least waste better than any competitors, which is the key point of Lean. This optimization moves stakeholders upward along the ontological teleology toward further and better being, and possibly toward getting beyond the ontological teleology itself. At their best, businesses ought to consider what stakeholders speculate may be beyond the ontological teleology from their personal perspectives since this search for meaning and universalization influences what actions they take in order to best adapt, reproduce, and energize in circular fashion. Improving all of these ontological factors is thus what businesses ought do to lean toward the highest profits, and use as their normative, ethical imperative. 

Ben Snipes (JD/MBA/LLM) is based in New York City. He wrote this book to discover what value truly means and how that knowledge is used to make a profit.