haha, I definitely saw some of that at Amazon

This highly-paid factory efficiency expert was enthusiastically explaining how he works. "You just listen to the workers. They know where the inefficiencies are"

That's lean.

Not really, lean would be listening to the workers

No matter how many times you recommend managers do this very thing, they do not.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh... Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs elaborates on this

I've worked with senior managers who have zero regard for the knowledge of the people doing the work. It might be those workers don't have some over-arching conceptual framework for how the company works, but they do have intimate and sometimes deep knowledge of what they do all day. And not taking advantage of that is a huge blind spot.

IMO that's what a good consultant does! I mean that's much more useful than the big 4.

Where I saw that work it was effectively routing around the middle layer: the guy bucking for a promotion based on some project isn’t going to let any report mention that the users hate it, but they’ll certainly tell the consultants that.

It worked but was a very expensive way to about fixing social problems.