Leanism Further Summarized

The following summarizes, “Leanism: The Philosophy of Business,” before diving into the confluence of business and philosophy within the paradigm of Lean to solve consumers’ deepest problems for a profit.

Value Stream 1: Headwaters

Value Stream 1 describes what the discipline and paradigm of Lean is, while explaining how Leanism extends its reach for you to make money well. Value Stream 1 does this by teaching you the philosophical implications of Lean from both its Eastern and Western traditions to incorporate into a business ideology. Value Stream 1 further introduces you to the U/People acronym and business model that you may use to structure your Lean thinking. Value Stream 1 explains the creative use of language throughout these texts, including capitalized acronyms, homonyms, hyphens -, forward slashes /, circumflexes “^”, and sigmas σ and Σ. Each conceptual fission, fusion and parallelism created through these methods compresses and unifies multiple levels of philosophical and business meaning to quickly capitalize on the far-reaching insights provided across all domains in which this book operates.

Value Stream 2: Money & Economics – Lean Normative, Real and Monetary Value

Any understanding of the metaphysics of Lean necessarily requires a sound grounding in the meaning of money for you to make it well. Value Stream 2: Money & Economics analyzes the secret life of money that you may have missed so you may go up along consumers’ value streams in ways you never expected.¹ You will learn the true, Lean value that makes money meaningful through market transactions, which cross all consumers’ value streams. Value Stream 2: Money & Economics attempts to review some of the intellectual history of money and economics and how that work applies within the balance of the U/People business model. Value Stream 2 prepares you to advance around, up and through the U/People organization chart and business model.

Value Stream 3: Existence – Lean Universal, Process and Personal Values

Following the Lean concept of Genchi Genbutsu directing all business people to go to the source of all production, Value Stream 3 sums up who and why consumers are from their mathematical, scientific, philosophical and personally intuitive perspectives. This Value Stream 3 leans to the philosophical extreme so you may better understand true-north value from the origin of life in Value Stream 4: Lives and human meaning and motivation in Value Stream 5: People’s. Value Stream 3: Existence takes you through the Lean solution space by factoring Eastern and Western traditions that form the intellectual foundation of Lean. This Value Stream 3 provides a new way of organizing this body of work so you may better understand it, slicing across academic disciplines to effectively dissect an HQ. All organizations may also use this Value Stream to form the cornerstone of their Houses of Quality (a Lean term for a company’s headquarters) to interrelate what they know and believe about existence with what consumers most truly value. Since these philosophical and scientific discussions involve the most fundamental questions, such as the origin of the universe and the human condition within it, they do get a bit abstract.²

Value Stream 3 introduces a new, Lean metaphysical concept of the Ontological Teleology, a.k.a. the “OT” or “Ought,” which is the possibly circular goal-directedness of life to further be, but possibly be more, because we live in an open-ended universe – consumers can only intuitively speculate at this present moment what their ultimate purpose is.³ The Ontological Teleology is designed to frame the range of what customers know, believe, and witness actually improving their lives and existences, which they pay to solve.

This Value Stream 3 simultaneously recognizes that customers hold intuitive truths and attempt to eliminate the problem of the seeming paradox of life lived through the OT with a variety of non-circular spiritual, theistic or scientismic beliefs. An organization’s products and/or services may serve these intuitively speculative beliefs in Lean fashion so long as those beliefs do not conflict with falsifiable, intersubjective truths or the deontological ethical and legal rules to which society agrees to cohere for everyone’s eusocial benefit. After reading Value Stream 3, you ought to be able to analyze what consumers will buy through the Lean Ontological Teleology to best extend and optimize their lives and existences by resolving their utmost problems most effectively.

Value Stream 4: Lives – Lean Living Systems

Value Stream 4: Lives applies the Lean true-north values arising from existence explained in Value Stream 3 to the systemic origin of life within the known universe. Value Stream 4 examines these issues against the backdrop of current Lean thinking to develop a Lean metaphysics that brings both business and philosophy back down to Earth. Value Stream 4 identifies the Lean slots from which living systems unexpectedly emerge, with each being a strategically unique degree of sophistication leading to its own Ontological Realization. This emergence is much like how a philosophy of Lean described in this book arises from and supervenes on the Lean meme itself.

Finally, this Value Stream 4 elaborates on the new, Lean concept of “Universalization” as the open-ended, possibly circular, end-goal of life when you bracket out intuitive, non-circular beliefs for business purposes. Universalization analyzes how customers actually live regardless of what they believe, which may be used as a further basis for a Lean true-north value theory of what consumers find most meaningful. Universalization is also largely how busy people discuss true-north value in the workplace, even if not in this same terminology, as I hope you will see.

Value Stream 5: People’s – Lean Ethics, Motivation and Factors of truth-value

Value Stream 5: People’s, extends the previous Value Stream 2: Money, Value Stream 3: Existence, and Value Stream 4: Lives through the disciplines of ethics and motivation in a strictly human context. Value Stream 5 will introduce you to the parameters of metaphysical, true-north value from which Lean originates. You will recognize these parameters as ones used to engage employees and market products and/or services daily. Value Stream 5 proposes a motivational or needs framework based on these Lean parameters to identify the problems customers have to live and exist into perpetuity that motivates them to purchase. This Value Stream 5 thus extends the normative, existential perspective of human meaning to the actual lives of consumers and their universalization by synthesizing who they are with what they ought to buy.⁴

Once this ethic of universalization gets established within an organization’s true-north business ideology, all Lean people in that workplace can then move the organization toward a universalized and collective ethic of extending all life within existence in whatever markets it operates. You will learn how to increase consumers’ and employees’ standard of existence in a possibly infinite universe, so you may monetize more meaning by solving more problems with the best solutions to delight the most people. Numerous, seemingly hubric, corporate credos and business ideologies demonstrate this Lean end-goal, and a few will be cited within this Value Stream 5. The Lean motivational drivers discussed in Value Stream 5 feed into how an organization behaves and what consumers want in the balance of the U/People business model. Finally in the prologue “Channels,” this book will review how the CMO, CEO, CFO, and IDEO best embody the philosophy of Lean in their good work.