Moving Forward Faster distills the six-volume, 1,000-page REAL LEAN series into one compact workbook aimed at the real bottleneck in most Lean efforts: The executive mind. Its premise is blunt: More than 95 percent of organizations that try Lean do it wrong, because senior leaders apply decades-old conventional thinking to a system built on the opposite logic. Through 85 short, pointed items, the book maps the specific economic, social, political, and historical preconceptions and beliefs leaders must shed to evolve from zero-sum "Fake Lean" (continuous improvement only) to win-win "REAL Lean" (continuous improvement and respect for people).
This book helps readers by:
- Uprooting Flawed Economic Beliefs. Identifies the economic ideas leaders must abandon, such as the demand for dangerous double-digit growth, replacing zero-sum, sellers' market assumptions with the stable, customer-driven, buyers' market logic Lean requires.
- Dismantling Harmful Social Beliefs. Confronts the social ideas that break Lean; chiefly the notion that "respecting people is optional" or that "doing harm does no harm," showing why layoffs, squeezing suppliers, and disrespect are fundamentally incompatible with the system.
- Removing Destructive Political Habits. Targets the organizational politics that executives carry over from conventional management, explaining how this wasteful, value-destroying behavior impedes flow and ruins Lean transformations.
- Learning From Repeated History. Shows how the same mistakes recur across decades, so leaders can recognize the patterns that have derailed progressive management before and avoid repeating them.
- Turning Insight into Movement. The "Next Steps" and "Closing Thoughts" sections convert the 85 items into forward motion, with appendices on Lean and Keynes, how conservatism fails customers, moving from reading to improving, and failure analysis of management decisions.
Deliberately short and workbook-style, this is a reflective, high-density read designed to change how executives think and what they do. For leaders and practitioners frustrated that tool and behavior training never produces true Lean leaders, Moving Forward Faster offers a distilled, honest map of the mental evolution that real transformation demands.
Dr. Bob Emiliani has been a progressive management practitioner and researcher for over 30 years. He worked in industry for 15 years and had management responsibility in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain management at Pratt & Whitney. Bob was part of a team responsible for implementing TPS principles and practices in both manufacturing and supply chains at Pratt & Whitney. Subsequently, he was full-time professor for 23 years. He now holds the honorary title of Professor Emeritus. Bob was the first academic to establish a research agenda focused on Lean leadership, resulting in numerous publications and varied leadership development workshops. Bob is a prolific, versatile, and award-winning writer whose publications span engineering, business, social sciences, and humanities. He has authored or co-authored 28 books and 45 peer-reviewed papers across six different disciplines (leadership, management, management history, supply chain management, higher education, and materials engineering). His work is widely recognized and he is praised for being a unique voice and a creative thinker.
