U/P: Lean Business Philosophy True-North Value

In my last semester of graduate business school, I was trying to understand exactly what the business curriculum taught when I stumbled onto the business discipline of “Lean.” From that point forward my thinking went sideways. I expected that during the business program I might have an “AHA” moment - an “AHA” moment synthesizing the entire degree into an overarching insight explaining how all business subjects led to making money. For comparison, in law school, that “AHA” moment for me was a sudden, intuitive sense of who, why, what, and how we regulate people, businesses and society. From business school though, I expected a singular understanding of the money making process. However, when I ran into the popular business concept of “Lean,” I realized that while I was taught the specific details of how money got made generally from all business activity, business school taught me nothing about the creation of “true-north value,” which money ought to represent and “Lean” advocates pursuing. There is a difference. I realized that while all business subjects allude to and try to quantify “value,” none fully described the genesis of “true-north value” in the way “Lean Thinking” suggests, which is helpful to know when leading a business toward creating the type of value for which customers willingly pay a price. I knew I had some extra-curricular work to do to graduate with the knowledge of true-north value applied to business that I was seeking. My business education then became a quest to understand the historical and philosophical foundation of “Lean” and apply it in my own life and business dealings. As I became more educated about the history of Lean, it became for me a unique synthesis of Western and Eastern philosophies used to reach measurable business results. Thus, in this text and through a close reading of others, I summarize and extend the intellectual legacy of Lean to its philosophical extreme, unifying everything from theoretical physics to the humanities to religion by further intertwining Lean like a golden braid within the themes that form the bedrock of all true-north value. Thus, you might find U/P to be an intellectual companion and counterpoint to all that has been written regarding Lean. Through this research and writing process, this book evolved to become simultaneously academic, literary and artistic. It became academic because I tried to not only write truly, but to support it copiously with legitimate, well-researched footnotes. I consider it literary because its symbolism requires that it actually be read to be fully appreciated. And it to me became artistic because I could only articulate true value in the space where words fade away, and that sense of the unspeakably sublime that I felt started coming out in the writing methods I used. The fission, fusion, parallelism, coherence and discoherence of its language began to model for me the physics and metaphysics of Lean. It became an abstract meditation on all busy-ness - a transcendent business book. I sincerely hope and expect that you will enjoy and learn from it as much as I have writing it. Thus, my purpose in writing this book is both ego-centric, in that I wrote it for my own entertainment and benefit, and allo-centric, in that I sincerely hope to pass on what I consider useful knowledge to you about the intellectual history and philosophy of Lean and business in general. By reading this book, I expect that you will learn a bit about history, a bit about philosophy, a bit about business, and a bit about yourself, which may be like rebuilding a ship you are already on, as the philosopher Otto Neurath famously said. However, by studying this intersection of “Lean,” “Business,” and “Philosophy,” I hope that you will become more powerful throughout your life’s journey.

Benjamin Snipes (JD/MBA/LLM) is currently based in New York City. He has been working for fourteen years as a corporate lawyer and in private industry. Ben is also a passionate autodidact in the history and application of plain-language philosophy. He wrote this book to discover what business value truly means and how that knowledge may be used in commerce.