The precepts in this group are advice from three quite different sources: Japanese manufacturing, older traditions of law and statecraft, and the community organiser's handbook. The first set tells managers how to improve an organisation from inside. The last tells outsiders how to force it to change. The contrast is instructive.
The Toyota practices
The largest cluster comes from Japanese manufacturing, and its precepts work as a system rather than separately. Kaizen asks for continuous small improvements from everyone. Genchi Genbutsu tells managers to go and see the actual place and the actual thing rather than rely on reports. The Five Whys pushes past a first explanation to a process cause. Hansei builds in reflection on what went wrong, and Nemawashi secures agreement privately before the meeting that formally decides.
What these share is a distrust of distance. Each assumes that the people closest to the work know most about it, and that managers who rely on summaries will act on a picture that is out of date or wrong. That assumption links them to uncertainty absorption in the evidence essay and to watermelon reporting among the figures.
Older rules about institutions
A second set is much older and more wary. De Minimis Non Curat Lex, the law does not concern itself with trifles, holds that institutions must ignore small matters or be swamped. Corruptio Optimi Pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst, warns that trusted institutions do the most damage when they fail. Kautilya's Honey on the Tongue assumes that anyone handling public funds will take some, and designs controls accordingly. Moltke's No Plan Survives Contact counsels planning for adaptation rather than for execution.
Rules for pressing from outside
Alinsky's organiser rules are written from the other side. The Rulebook Rule presses an institution by holding it to its own stated standards. The Expertise Rules, the Enjoyment Rule and the Drag Rule concern the campaigners themselves: stay within your own experience, choose tactics people will keep doing, and end a tactic before it tires your side. Read alongside the Toyota practices, they show the same understanding of how organisations respond, used to opposite ends.
Where it applies
The Toyota practices have spread from car plants to hospitals, software and public services, wherever a process runs often enough to be improved. The Two-Pizza Rule, Amazon's limit on team size, is a modern restatement of the evidence on span of control. The older maxims apply to anyone designing controls: de minimis to the scope of a rule, Kautilya to the handling of money. The Alinsky rules apply to unions, campaigns and consumer groups, and to anyone on the receiving end who wants to understand the pressure.
Where it is argued over
The commercial precepts carry the strongest disputes. The Friedman Doctrine holds that a company's sole social responsibility is to make profits within the rules, and it is contested by stakeholder theorists who argue that obeying the law does not make a firm bear the costs it imposes. The Customer Is Always Right works as commercial policy and is criticised for what it costs staff. The Five Whys is criticised in safety research for producing one chain of causes where most failures have several, and the Synergy Principle states a benefit of groups that the research finds only under particular conditions.
Why it is worth knowing
Organisations are changed from inside by patient improvement and from outside by pressure, and each approach has its own rules. Knowing both makes a manager more alert to what outside pressure is exploiting, and makes a campaigner more realistic about how an institution will respond. The older maxims supply what both need: a working assumption that people and institutions will behave as their incentives allow.
The entries behind this essay: Precept in Organizations & Bureaucracy. Every subject has its essays on the essays page.