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Improvement: A Hundred-Year Plan for Progressive Management
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781732019133
Publisher: Cubic, LLC
Published: Nov 9 2020
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.72
Height: 0.58 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Improvement confronts a frustrating historical pattern: Every few decades a dedicated group of promoters revive progressive management. Interest is strong for 30 to 40 years and then fades away. A future generation starts over and repeats the same mistakes. The aim of the book is not a project plan but a mindset and a set of lessons for carrying progressive management forward continuously across generations, into a future increasingly dominated by machine technology.
This book helps readers by:
- Explaining Why Progress Keeps Stalling. The introduction and framing show how one generation of reformers skips over the achievements and problems of a prior generation, producing a cycle of interruption rather than continuous evolution, and why that costs decades of lost progress.
- Arming Advocates Against Predictable Objections. Identifies the three recurring arguments used to defend the status quo - Jeopardy, Perversity, and Futility - so progressive management advocates can recognize this reactionary rhetoric loop, refute it, and avoid the traps it sets to ensnare them.
- Making the Case for Learning from History. Confronts the pride reformers take in ignoring the past, exposing how leaders and followers alike repeat old mistakes, fall for glossy sales pitches over real track records, and refuse to accept criticism of their heroes.
- Redefining What Continuous Improvement Means. Attacks the habit of treating improvement as a one-time event, showing how classically managed organizations suppress the intellectual and creative abilities of most employees, and why unlocking there is always a better way thinking is the real work.
- Grounding The Plan in Rigorous Analysis. Two substantial appendices - a teleological/ateleological analysis of classical, Lean, and Toyota management, and a social theory of the Lean movement - give readers the deeper scholarly foundation behind the book's findings.
Rather than a step-by-step roadmap, this is a long-horizon guide to intention, mindset, and the mistakes worth not repeating, written to preserve human-centered management thinking so future generations can build on it instead of rediscovering it. For promoters, practitioners, scholars, who sense their field keeps running in place, it offers both an explanation and a durable way forward.
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