Stop Following the Money

To understand why most top business leaders resist, reject, or ignore Lean management, stop following the money!

For decades, most people have attributed CEOs’ lack of interest in progressive management to money:

• Short-term profit focused

• Not understanding the financial benefits of Lean

• Unclear return on investment for Lean

While these seem to make a lot of sense as causes, they are merely surface-level artifacts of much deeper-level causes. Yet people keep proffering these as answers, but to no avail in terms of improvement — i.e., getting more CEOs interested in progressive management. The Lean-money correlation is incorrect. It does not produce useful answers because it is merely a “taxonomic” explanation (i.e., explaining something by categorizing it), and thus not a “genetic” explanation of the origin of leaders’ disinterest in Lean.

The invention of money as a medium of exchange for various transactions, is recent in human history, dating back about 5000 years. Homo sapiens, however, …