Shrewd and perceptive, though the leap from describing a poor implementation of lean to an out-and-out condemnation of it...
A short indictment of the lean approach to management from the perspective of an unidentified employee at an unidentified company that is two years into the lean transformation.
Employee X sets the stage for his critique with a chapter called “Voice from the Factory Floor” and an epigraph, taken from The Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields,” about the ease of living in a state of intentional ignorance and misunderstanding. He applies that mindset to those involved with lean—a business methodology based on methods developed at Toyota Production System, a Toyota factory—which, quoting a consultancy group, X describes as a method that “enables a process or business to realize its true performance potential through the fundamental use and application of various tools to see waste and eliminate waste.” For two decades, lean has been making headway in business circles, but X calls into question that direction for a variety of reasons. First, he references its supposed company dropout rate of “more than 90%.” X assesses the chances that his company will complete the implementation at less than 50%—though he later says that the implementation has been indefinitely suspended—and states that his aim, in addition to providing feedback to the lean community, is to warn others who may be considering the move. Each of the following nine chapters uses a quotation from a famous children’s story or movie—“Hansel and Gretel,” The Wizard of Oz, Cinderella (the Disney movie), “Jack and the Beanstalk,” etc.—to criticize the slated five-year implementation of lean at his company, which he refers to as Woodcutter Enterprises, by consultants, whom he refers to as Witches and Tyrants Federated. The childish nicknames and acronyms undercut the authority of the commentary, even though some of his criticisms—such as employees referring to lean using words such as “cult,” “brainwashing,” and “Gestapo tactics”—are damning. Nonetheless, his admissions that he doesn’t have all the facts and has not had access to all “relevant materials” or attended all meetings make him appear to be aboveboard and honest about his level of knowledge and involvement.
Shrewd and perceptive, though the leap from describing a poor implementation of lean to an out-and-out condemnation of it may not be justified.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 110
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
