Preface
Prologue
Part I - The System That Worked - For Its Time
Chapter 1. What TPS Actually Was
1.1 The Post-War Japanese Context
1.2 The Genius of Taiichi Ohno
1.3 The Shingo Lineage: Letters, "I Don't Know," an NSF Invitation, and a Conference.
1.4 What TPS Required - The Three Engineering Domains
1.5 A Multi-Echelon Pull System and the Black Box Supplier System
1.6 What Made It Work Then - And Why It No Longer Does
1.7 What This Chapter Has Established - And a Provocation
Chapter 2. What We Imported
2.1 The Translation That Lost the Meaning
2.2 The Engineering Void
2.3 The Practices That Were Hollowed
2.4 Why the Toolkit Won
2.5 What This Chapter Has Established
Chapter 3. The Mirage Revealed
3.1 The Plateau: Why Lean Transformations Stall - The Data
3.2 The Hidden Rigidity: When Standards Become Prisons
3.3 The Stress Test Failures: COVID, Supply Shocks, and Demand Shifts
3.4 The Collapse: Quality and Strategic Paralysis
3.5 What This Chapter Has Established
Part II - The Lean Paradox Exposed
Chapter 4. The Retreat from Engineering
4.1 The Engineers Who Built the Philosophies
4.2 Honda: The Company That Spun Engineering Off, Then Swallowed It
4.3 Toyota: The Accountant in the Engineer's Chair
4.4 Two Retreats, One Pressure
Chapter 5. The Business Delusions That Sustain the Lean Paradox
5.1 Three Retreats, No Reaction
5.2 Rosenzweig's Nine Delusions - Applied to Lean
5.3 A Holistic Summary: The Five Delusions That Lock Executives in the Lean Paradox Cage.
5.4 Breaking the Delusion
5.5 The Deeper Diagnosis: Why We Keep Getting It Wrong
5.6 What This Chapter Has Established
Part III - The Twelve Biases and Four Traps
Chapter 6. The Twelve Lean Biases That Must Be Unlearned
6.1 The Twelve Biases at a Glance
6.2 The Biases in Action
Chapter 7. The Design Traps - How the Lean Paradox Begins
7.1 How to Read the Bias Tables
7.2 The Silo Trap - Optimizing Parts
7.3 The Frozen Map Trap - Mistaking Reality
7.4 How the Frozen Map Trap Feeds the Checklist Trap
7.5 Summary: The Design Traps
Chapter 8. The Behavioral Traps - How the Cycle Closes
8.1 The Checklist Trap - Enforcing Compliance
8.2 The Stagnation & Blame Trap - Killing Learning
8.3 Summary: The Behavioral Traps
8.4 Breaking the Cycle
8.5 Changing the Board
Interlude. Why Smart Executives Get Trapped
Part IV - Recalibration for the AI Age
Chapter 9. Lean + AI Won't Be Enough
9.1 The Strategic Context: A Pattern Repeating
9.2 What Others Saw - And Built
9.3 The Engineering Frameworks That Fill the Void
9.4 The Architecture, Not the Tools
9.5 Why Lean + AI Won't Work - The General Motors Trap: A Warning from History.
9.6 What You Can Do - Without Building a New Factory
9.7 The Architecture Question
Chapter 10. The LLM as Thinking Partner
10.1 What an LLM Is - and What It Changes
10.2 Five Principles for the Early 21st Century
10.3 The Individual Interaction: One Leader, One LLM
10.4 The Group Interaction: Structured Unlearning Sessions
10.5 How to Use AI Without Being Used by It
Chapter 10 -Supplement. What NOT to Do
Part V - The Path Forward
Chapter 11. The COO Conversation
11.1 What You Now See
11.2 The Compass: Two Tracks, Different Clocks
11.3 The Conversation Sequence - Protect, Stop, Stabilize, Redesign, Build
11.4 Your Specific Ship
Field Guide
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
