"We never reckoned with how 'mean' would affect the quality of life and ethics of professionals or with the unseemly pressures that would be exerted by 'lean'" (62)

This is an unique sentence structure – it breaks down the common phrase "lean and mean" into its two components: "lean", meaning cutting any excess, and "mean", meaning focused on a specific objective. And by being able to connect both of those two words to the actual situation they are being used to describe, "lean": workers are seeing their salaries cut, and "mean": workers are doing everything they can to get to their objective of obtaining more money, readers are convinced that "lean and mean" is an apt description of the cheating culture.