For some companies, the "lean philosophy" is a post hoc justification for stripping the workforce to the bare functional minimum, or even below. I think it's du

For some companies, the "lean philosophy" is a post hoc justification for stripping the workforce to the bare functional minimum, or even below. I think it's due to a combination of various pathological factors: the popular dogma that the responsibility to shareholders is to maximize profit to the greatest degree in the shortest possible time; the concomitant public company quarterly earnings treadmill and conflation of stock price with marketplace success; misaligned interests and perverse incentives among management and worker tiers; the "austerity yields prosperity" meme; lack of compensation-driven stakeholder mentality in top management; and the oversimplification fallacy that, especially with large entities, no matter how many pieces comprise the whole, one more can always be removed.