Introduction

The history of "Lean" as a business discipline begins with Toyota Motor Corporation, its collaborators, and the scholars studying it. Lean developed from the Toyota Production System, which evolved from the history western and eastern scientific and manufacturing knowledge to become a new form of human-centered mass production. Following Ford's factory system, Lean innovated by seeing machines as a means rather than ends, with people not just appreciated, but forming the central pillar of production while surrounded by automation. "Leanism" is a new form of Lean that provides next level results with people surrounded by, and leading with AI toward the greatest business value.

Leanism is the form of Lean that allows people to best lead with AI by expanding Lean into a holistic philosophy. With the explosive use of LLMs, and massive, continuous investment in AI, people can now direct AI in the way AI needs with Leanism. AI has all the knowledge and information possible, but lacks the deepest understanding of what is actually valuable. AI will do whatever you want, but Leanism is the intellectual tool for human beings to achieve results with it.

But in this epoch of human/AI collaboration, Leanism requires people to become action-oriented philosophers in their own right to ask the best questions and rigorously assess the output. Leanism insists that people who want to lead with AI must develop the transendental understanding of true value that AI lacks. Leading with AI requires this chasm to be crossed, but your reward will be a central role and continued relevance in the age of AI.

The direction of our thinking about AI, value creation, and human agency must radically change. Leanism provides the way.

As artificial intelligence now transforms how we create value, I came to realize something profound: while AI represents the most powerful tool humanity has ever created, what had been missed by nearly everyone was that Lean, precisely because it was conceived as a human-centered philosophy for achieving productivity with machines, is the right vehicle for leading with AI in uniquely human ways. But while AI is a fundamentally different type of information technology, Lean must be used differently with AI as well. "Leanism" develops Lean into a metaphysical framework that allows people to think through and beyond AI prompts, to guide these knowledge-work machines toward true-north value creation rather than mere output generation.

To apply Lean to AI in business, you must synthesize human knowlege into a unified understanding of how humans best think, and how our thinking relates to AI inputs and outputs. We as people must approach AI with overarching insight understading how to create genuine value in an age where AI can generate infinite content but cannot inherently understand value itself. While anyone can learn the mechanics of AI implementation and process automation, we must also teach ourselves how to lead with AI as a uniquely human endeavor—how to prompt not just for outputs, but for outcomes aligned with our own, unique true-north value.

I realized that while everyone has been learning to write better prompts, no one was teaching the philosophical framework for thinking beyond prompts entirely, for leading with AI rather than simply using it. There was no "AHA" moment coming from established institutions, particularly those pushing the narrative that AI left no role for people. I knew then I had work to do to apply the same principles Toyota used to achieve human-machine collaboration in manufacturing to human-AI collaboration in knowledge work—how Lean's human-centered approach to machine productivity could now impact the real world through AI. This has become a quest to understand and explain how Lean, as a philosophy born from optimizing human-machine systems, could teach us to lead with AI in ways that amplify rather than diminish human wisdom, judgment, and value creation.

While reading deeply into Lean and simultaneously experimenting with AI systems, the somewhat strange acronym, "U/People" (or "You lean toward people") came to mind. The acronym also stood for, "Uniquely/Profitably, Extending and Optimizing People's Lives and Existences." "U/People" can also mean the universe divided by people, which to me is the only way to measure units of true value—something AI cannot calculate on its own without human direction since the numerator is open-ended.

This odd acronym cohered and explained for me how to lead with AI rather than be led by it, how to think beyond the prompt to the purpose, beyond the output to the outcome, beyond the artificial to the authentically valuable. I relate each letter of the "U/People" acronym to specific business departments and functions of the modern enterprise who use AI, and those departments and functions to the deepest levels of true-north value and problem solving—the very things that distinguish human leadership with AI from mere prompt engineering. It also alludes to the deeper premise of Lean as a holistic philosophy perfectly suited for the AI age—that all value that companies create and consumers pursue ultimately has an ontological basis that only humans can perceive and that AI must be used to serve.

U/People was my AHA moment for understanding how to lead with AI in the knowledge economy just as Lean led machines in manufacturing. I wanted to understand value creation in the AI age and came away with an acronym that everyone ought to know in order to lead with AI toward helping others and themselves rather than replacing human judgment with machine output. While I originally intended just to make a simple pamphlet or diagram explaining how the U/People acronym explains Lean's application to AI, my thoughts kept growing on the page to become what I hope to be a well-researched book written with fun and style. And this became more than just a book to me because it led me to the most profound and unexpected places, revealing how Lean—born from human-machine collaboration in physical production—provides the exact philosophical framework we need for human-AI collaboration in knowledge production.

So studying the history, theory and philosophy of Lean through the lens of AI led me to books on widely different topics that all seemed to align with understanding how humans can lead machines in uniquely human ways—works like Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach" on cognition and recursion, Jim Collins' and Jerry Porras' "Built to Last" on enduring principles, David Deutsch's "The Beginning of Infinity" on knowledge creation, and Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" on what makes humans unique. Thus, in this text and through a close reading of books like these, I demonstrate how Lean provides the philosophical framework for thinking through and beyond AI prompts—for leading with AI rather than simply using it, for bringing human wisdom to machine capability, for ensuring that the knowledge-work machines of today serve true-north value just as the manufacturing machines of Toyota's era did. Thus, you might find "Leanism" to be the intellectual foundation you need to lead with AI in uniquely human ways.

While I delve into the intellectual foundations of Lean's application to AI, AI is only growing more ubiquitous in business and life, with organizations struggling to understand how to lead these powerful tools and meaningfully incorporate them rather than be passively led by them even if for marketing purposes. When reading about AI implementation and the enormous number of books produced on prompt engineering and AI strategy, they further reinforced for me the proposition that what was missing was precisely what Lean offered: a human-centered philosophy for achieving productivity with machines, now applied to knowledge work and AI systems.

My own research and writing of this book on Lean and AI evolved to become simultaneously academic, literary and artistic in scope and ambition. It became academic because I tried to not only write truly about the intersection of Lean philosophy and AI leadership, but to support it copiously with legitimate, well-researched footnotes. I consider it literary because its total meaning, how to think beyond prompts and lead AI in uniquely human ways, requires it to be read to be fully appreciated. And it to me became artistic because I could only articulate how humans can lead AI toward true-north value in the space where mechanistic thinking fades away and human wisdom emerges, and that sense of the unspeakably sublime that I felt started coming out in the writing methods I used. The fission, fusion, parallelism, coherence and discoherence of its language began to model for me how human thought can guide AI beyond mere pattern matching toward genuine value creation.

Leanism is intended to be a linguistic technology to improve your thinking in order to lead with AI to optimize everyone's life and existence. To forewarn, Leanism does have its own terminology described in its glossary that leverages and extends the Lean vernacular. This glossary is designed to compress and relate the vast concepts within Leanism to make it easier for you, as a human being, to lead with AI through the prompts present throughout the text. But this unique vocabularly allows you to think through and beyond prompts, to direct rather than simply query, to lead in uniquely human ways.

If you read this book end-to-end, you will be able to lead with AI toward outcomes aligned with true-north value using this unique terminology and philosophical framework. That in-turn will let you efficiently guide AI systems toward solving real-world problems more effectively while producing less waste than you otherwise would have, which in Lean is the highest form of true-north value creation possible—and which represents the perfect application of Lean's human-centered machine productivity principles from manufacturing to the knowledge context.

Thus, my purpose in writing this book is both ego-centric, in that I wrote it for my own understanding of how to lead with AI rather than be led by it, and allo-centric, in that I sincerely hope to pass on what I consider to be essential knowledge about how Lean—conceived as a human-centered approach for creating massive productivity with machines—provides the perfect philosophical framework for the AI age. By reading this book, I expect that you will learn how to think through and beyond AI prompts, how to lead with AI in uniquely human ways, and how to apply Lean principles born from manufacturing to knowledge work in order to impact the real world through AI-human collaboration that amplifies rather than replaces human judgment.

Edwin Land, founder of the Polaroid Corporation, once said, "Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible." I have often felt that writing a book on how to lead with AI by exanding Lean into a holistic philosophy qualified supremely on both accounts, and so I thrust myself forward in the open-ended endeavor of trying to produce something of lasting value that in my wildest dreams might help you lead AI toward everyone's benefit in ways that are uniquely, irreplaceably human.