Irrational Institutions: Business, Its Leaders, and The Lean Movement - Paperback

by Bob Emiliani (Author)

Why do business leaders - generation after generation - reject the new progressive management systems that actually work?

From Scientific Management to Total Quality to Six Sigma to Lean, the pattern is unmistakable: leaders embrace just enough to push workers harder, then quietly retreat to the comfort of the status quo. Irrational Institutions delivers the unflinching answer.

Drawing on three decades inside the Lean movement, the author turns a scholar-practitioner's lens on business, leadership, and Lean itself - exposing how irrationality is designed into the institutions we consistently mistake as being rational.

Most strikingly, Irrational Institutions introduces aesthetics as a new analytical tool, revealing how leaders' built-in judgments of "beauty" (headquarters, peers, the word "yes") and "ugliness" (the factory floor, problems, the word "but") quietly defeat reason at every turn.

Irrational Institutions is an important companion volume to The Triumph of Classical Management Over Lean Management.