Foreword

I went to business school like so many aspiring professionals to learn how to exchange value for money. That’s when I came across the business philosophy of “Lean.” Lean was developed by Toyota, collaborators and academics over the course of Toyota’s becoming the world’s leading car manufacturer. Businesses across the world of all sizes have adopted Lean, and countless books have analyzed and expanded it, to help themselves and others realize similar success.

However, I came to realize that while companies adopted and authors wrote about Lean methods, a more profound and powerful aspect of Lean had been missed by all - Lean is so effective and widely applicable because it is a modern philosophy - a metaphysics - for business and life today. Lean’s precepts come from its profound truth that extends beyond business, which makes Lean much more powerful, universal, timeless, and profitable once fully understood. From that point forward the direction of my thinking about the creation and exchange of value radically changed.

Law students are told to expect that by the end of their first year of law school all of the different legal courses they are studying will come together in their minds in a single “AHA” moment, synthesizing into a unified understanding of how the legal way of thinking works. I expected my business education to provide a similar overarching insight explaining how all business subjects lead to making money through value creation. When I stumbled upon Lean, I realized that while business school taught the specific details of how money got made from business activity, it taught me nothing about the creation of true “value,” which Lean terminology calls “true-north value,” in order to exchange money for it. I realized that while all business subjects allude to and try to quantify value, none fully described the genesis and structure of value itself, which the greatest businesses do. There was no “AHA” moment coming from business school without something more, and I suspected to find the insight in Lean. I knew then I had a lot of further work to do besides attend classes to graduate with the deep knowledge of value creation I was seeking in order to be highly effective at making money, which was fundamentally an axiological endeavor. My business education became a quest to understand the historical and theoretical foundation of Lean, and expand on it intellectually to realize its full potential as a business philosophy. This book is my attempt to share that learning with you for your own financial and personal success.

Perhaps because my head was spinning with thought from reading so deeply into Lean, the somewhat strange acronym, “U/People” (or “You lean toward people”) came to mind. The acronym also stood for, “Uniquely/Profitably, Extending and Optimizing People’s Lives and Existences.” “U/People” can also mean the universe divided by people, which to me is the only way to measure units of true value. This odd acronym cohered and explained for me the entire value stream in a way the formal business curriculum missed. I relate each letter of the “U/People” acronym to specific business departments and functions of the modern enterprise, and those departments and functions to the deepest levels of true-north value and problem solving, as will be explained later. It also alludes to the deeper premise of Lean as a holistic philosophy - that all value that companies create and consumers pursue ultimately has an ontological basis - whereby existence becomes its own measure of value.¹

U/People was my AHA moment I had sought by going to business school. I went to business school to get the intuitive sense of how to make money that successful entrepreneurs implicitly know and came away with an acronym that everyone ought to know in order to better help others and themselves. While I originally intended just to make a simple pamphlet or diagram explaining how the U/People acronym explains Lean, my thoughts kept growing on the page to become what I hope to be a well-researched book written with fun and style. And this became more than just a book to me because it led me to the most profound and unexpected places, far beyond what most business books cover. By writing it, I kept finding connections between radically different concepts and multiple levels of meaning, seeing similarities and differences across disciplines - including within language itself - which I put back into the book at every turn.

So studying the history, theory and philosophy of Lean led me to books on widely different topics that all seemed to align for one reason or another with the philosophical, humanistic and post-humanistic concepts of Lean, like Douglas Hofstadter’s, “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” Jim Collins’ and Jerry Porras’, “Built to Last,” David Deutsch’s, “The Beginning of Infinity,” and Yuval Noah Harari’s, “Sapiens.” Thus, in this text and through a close reading of books like these, I summarize and extend the business discipline of Lean to its theoretical extreme, unifying everything from physics to the humanities to religion by further intertwining Lean like a golden braid within the themes that form the bedrock of all true-north value. Thus, you might find “Leanism” to be an intellectual companion and counterpoint to all that has been written about Lean.

While I delved into the intellectual foundations of Lean, Lean was only growing more popular in business with its widespread adoption by startups through Eric Ries’ book, “The Lean Startup.” When reading The Lean Startup and the enormous number of other Lean-oriented books that had been produced to capitalize on the “Lean” business trend, they further reinforced for me the proposition that Lean represented a unique perspective on how to achieve success in business and life.

My own research and writing of this book on Lean evolved to become simultaneously academic, literary and artistic in scope and ambition. It became academic because I tried to not only write truly, but to support it copiously with legitimate, well-researched footnotes. I consider it literary because its total meaning requires it to be read to be fully appreciated. And it to me became artistic because I could only articulate true-north value in the space where words fade away, and that sense of the unspeakably sublime that I felt started coming out in the writing methods I used. The fission, fusion, parallelism, coherence and discoherence of its language began to model for me the physics and metaphysics of Lean. I sincerely hope and expect that you will enjoy and learn from it as much as I have writing it.

Leanism is intended to be a linguistic technology to improve your thinking in order to optimize everyone’s life and existence. To forewarn, Leanism does have its own terminology described in its glossary that leverages and extends the Lean vernacular. This glossary is designed to compress and relate the vast concepts within Leanism to make it easier for you to apply it in your own life, existence and work once you learn it. If you read this book end-to-end, you will be able to describe the psychological motivation of all people in ontological terms with this unique terminology. That in-turn will let you efficiently translate everything into scientific, philosophical and even spiritual concepts in a fairly concise way. And by converting between these seemingly disparate worlds of thought, you will be able to better think through and solve people’s problems more effectively while producing less waste than you otherwise would have, which in Lean is the highest form of true-north value creation possible.

Thus, my purpose in writing this book is both ego-centric, in that I wrote it for my own entertainment and benefit, and allo-centric, in that I sincerely hope to pass on what I consider to be useful knowledge to you about the intellectual history and this expanded theory of Lean. By reading this book, I expect that you will learn a bit about history, a bit about economics, a bit about philosophy, and a bit about yourself, which may be like rebuilding a ship you are already on, as the philosopher Otto Neurath famously said. However, by studying the metaphysics of Lean, I hope that you will become more powerful throughout your life’s journey.

Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, once said, “Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”² I have often felt that writing a book on the philosophy of business based on Lean qualified supremely on both accounts, and so I thrust myself forward in the open-ended endeavor of trying to produce something of lasting value that in my wildest dreams might it be used by you for everyone’s benefit.