Lean Software Engineering

Now that the cat’s out of the bag…

Modus Cooperandi is a new management consulting firm, founded by Agile Management pioneer David Anderson, Social Media guru Jim Benson, and yours truly in the role of Principal Consultant. Which of course means that David and Jim will be out hogging the spotlight and hobnobbing with bigwigs while I’m out delivering training classes and coaching development teams. But seriously, it’s a great privilege to work with such excellent people. I’m delighted with the direction we are taking, and Lean coaching is something that I truly love to do.

Which means (hint, hint) that we are for hire! So if you ever found yourself thinking something like: if only we could hire a Lean/Agile guru like David Anderson to come help us out…well, you can!

I’ve been a bit quiet here lately, but we all believe that blogging is an important part of the business. Modus Cooperandi is all about taking the high road, and we believe that lasting business success goes to those companies that do more for their customers. I expect we’ll have all sorts of interesting topics to write about in the near future, as we’re out there doing our best to help our clients deliver on that promise.

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.