Why Business Leaders Dislike Progressive Management
Two of many choices: (1) Read Bob’s work and save oneself decades of frustration or (2) Ignore Bob’s work, struggle for decades, read Bob’s work, and wish you read it decades ago. For those on the fence - If you’ve ever thought, 'How do we get leadership to buy in to our efforts?,' Bob’s work answers this question from many angles. -- William Harvey
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For more than a century, people could not figure out why generations of top business leaders continued to prefer archaic classical management over the modern forms of progressive management -- Scientific Management, Toyota's management system, and Lean management. They deduced many surface-level reasons, but they lacked the interest or analytical capabilities to dig deeper into the problem.
This problem was apparent to me in the late 1990s, but it was not until around 2007 that I took a serious interest in solving the problem, "Why do most top leaders resist, reject, or ignore progressive management." So, I embarked on a 16-year research project to answer that question.
But rather than provide an answer from a singular perspective, I sought to answer the question from multiple perspectives to produce a more comprehensive and thus more useful answer.
I wrote a breakthrough six-volume series that will change how you think and how you see the world. The six books listed below analyze the problem from not one, but from six different directions due to the complexity of the problem:
Status, rights, and privileges
Irrationality
Secular spirituality
Aesthetics
Preconceptions
Workmanship
- The Triumph of Classical Management Over Lean Management: How Tradition Prevails and What to Do About It
- Irrational Institutions: Business, Its Leaders, and The Lean Movement
- Management Mysterium: The Quest for Progress
- The Aesthetic Compass: Foundation of Leadership Action and Inaction
- A Changed Perspective: An Essential Guide for Emerging Leaders
- The Workmanship of Leaders: Systems, Frameworks, and Information Processing
The research was conducted in relation to my own industrial management experiences plus direct interaction with business leaders through 20+ years of executive training, education, and coaching, and careful observation. And each book is rich with citations evidencing the wide scope of the research.
There are no other books like these. They are essential reading for those who favor progressive management. In addition to answering dozens of related questions, they also are a great source of new ideas for improving the promotion and practice of progressive management.
Click on the links above to learn more about each book.
It is best to read the books in the order shown above.