Improvement

Mistakes that impede the advancement of progressive management.

Let’s face it. How Lean is understood and promoted are both in need of significant improvement. Improvement shows you the way.

For nearly 140 years, efforts to systematically improve management practice have encountered one barrier after another and the commission of repetitive mistakes that thwart sustained progress towards better leadership and management practice. For progressive management to advance, its promoters and practitioners need to understand the principal arguments against it and the recurring mistakes that are made which serve only to further extend the useful life of classical management.

Improvement puts progressive management into historical perspective and helps readers understand the progress that has been made and what has yet to be achieved. It provides clear guidelines that current and future generations can put into practical use so that progressive management will gain wider acceptance and continuously evolve in response to changing conditions.

And don’t forget to read The Triumph of Classical Management Over Lean Management, Irrational Institutions, Management Mysterium and The Aesthetic Compass to gain a complete understanding of how you can more effectively advance progressive management. This series of four books meticulously analyze the forces that guide leaders’ thinking which results in maintaining the status quo and continued adherence to archaic classical management. Progress is made when minds are opened.

Reviews of Improvement

Improvement starts off in a stern tone, but it ends with a more hopeful position that management is evolving, albeit very slowly, in the right direction, as younger generations and changing circumstances demand better. I like how it tries to reconcile progressivism in management with the interests of conservative business leaders, a point of much confusion it seems, for some conservatives, who tend to negatively associate the words ‘progressive’ with ‘liberal.’ And there is much to like in the no nonsense directives in the chapter on the improvement mindset. (Read Ken’s detailed review).

Ken Eakin

This book is a Tour de Force explanation of the history and evolution of Progressive Management and its battle to be adopted in place of Classical Management. The book explains what has been tried before and then again tried unsuccessfully because previous attempts were lost and forgotten. Hope springs eternal and doing what is right for all is a noble pursuit.

Jack P.

More Information

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Book Details

Improvement: A Hundred-Year Plan for Progressive Management

by Bob Emiliani
Cubic, LLC South Kingstown, RI, USA

254 pages • ISBN 978-1-7320191-3-3 • November 2020

Preface
Introduction
Chapter 1. Arguments Against Progressive Management
Chapter 2. Learn from the Past
Chapter 3. The Improvement Mindset
Final Thoughts
Appendix I. Teleological and Ateleological Analysis of Classical, Lean, and Toyota Management Systems and the Lean Movement
Appendix II. The Transformation of Lean: A Social Theory of the Lean Movement
About the Author