Lean Software Engineering

Maybe Friedman was right. One of the problems with the American style of business is not that it pursues profit above all else, but that it does not. The traditional style of corporate America is the pursuit of hierarchy above all else, and profit only appears as a necessary side effect. This is much of what I find compelling about lean and ToC: they place sustainable and profitable production as the highest goal, and organization adapts to serve that goal. Corporate America gets this backward: business exists as a franchise to fund social hierarchy and the executive lifestyle, and massive waste is created in the process.

One of the central myths of capitalism is that it rewards merit. It does not, nor should it. The problem with “merit” is that it is an authoritarian idea. Merit according to who? Free markets substitute prices and profit for merit as a proxy for the collective preferences of their participants, which are otherwise unknowable.

The downside of laissez-faire capitalism is that it rewards gambling above all else, and that is when it is working well. Historically, I think this has served as a counterweight to natural human risk aversion, but speculative windfalls create public resentment and impart a false sense of meritorious entitlement to their beneficiaries. When capitalism isn’t working well, it rewards corruption and puts the Hegelian pendulum in motion, creating destruction and misery in its wake.

People are happiest when capitalism rewards effort. A healthy political regulation of a market aligns effort with profit to maximise public satisfaction as both producers of labor and consumers of goods. Again, this is much of the reason I find Lean so compelling. Continuous improvement creates abundance, profit provides incentive, demand provides direction.

The right process will produce the right results. It’s almost Buddhist.