If I had to suggest something which is both robustly good and disputable, I would suggest this principle:

Focus on minimizing the time between when you have an idea and when your customer benefits from that idea.

Evidence for being robustly good

This principle has a variety of names, as many different industries have rediscovered the same idea.

The most famous formulation of this principle is probably as part of the Toyota Production System. Traditional assembly lines took a long time to set up, but once set up, they could pump out products incredibly fast. Toyota decided to change their focus instead towards responding rapidly, e.g. they set a radical goal of being able to change each of their dies in less than 10 minutes.
Toyota’s success with this and other rapid response principles inspired a just-in-time manufacturing revolution.
These principles were included in lean manufacturing, which has led to a variety of derivatives like lean software development and the lean startup.
Another stream of development is in the software world, notably with the publication of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, which drew from prior methodologies like Extreme Programming.
Agile project management is now common in many technical fields outside of software.

This underlying principle, as well as its accoutrements like Kanban boards, can be seen in a huge variety of successful industries, from manufacturing to IT. The principle of reducing turnaround time can be applied by single individuals to their own workflow, or by multinational conglomerates. While it is easier to do agile project management in an agile company, it’s entirely possible for small teams (or even individuals) to unilaterally focus on reducing their turnaround times (meaning that this principle is not dependent on specific organizational cultures or processes).There are also more theoretical reasons to think this principle is robustly good. The planning fallacy is a well-evidenced phenomenon, and it reasonably would lead people to underestimate how important rapid responses are (since they believe they can forecast the future more accurately than they actually can).

Evidence for being disputable

Other candidates

Some other possible principles which are both robustly useful and disputable:

Appendix: Evidence From India

One of the most famous experiments in management is Does management matter? Evidence from India. This involved sending highly-paid management consultants to randomly selected textile firms in India. The treatment group had significant improvements relative to the control group (e.g. 11% increase in productivity).How did they accomplish these gains? Through changes like:

Putting trash outside, instead of on the factory floor
Sorting and labeling excess inventory, instead of putting it in a giant heap
Doing preventative maintenance on machines, instead of running them until they break down

I think the conclusion here is that “disputable” is a relative term – I doubt any US plant managers need to be convinced that they should buy garbage bins. Most of the benefits that the management consultants were able to provide were simply in encouraging adherence to (what managers in the US consider to be) “obvious” best practices. Those best practices clearly were not “obvious” to the Indian managers.

Leadership