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Some of our favorite management improvement books are: The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes, The Improvement Guide, The Art of Problem Solving by Russ Ackoff, Fourth Generation Management by Brian Joiner and Lean Solutions by James Womack and Daniel Jones.
Find many more books at the Curious Cat Management Improvement Bookstore.
Rich Sharpe posted to his blog on his recent reading of Dr. Deming – The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality by Rafael Aguayo in Lean Programming and Dr. Deming. And he posted a response he received from Rafael Aguayo with some good points including:
Related: Another Failure Due to Quotas - Targets Distort the System - Goodbye Quarterly Targets - Books on Deming’s management ideas - Making Changes and Taking Risks
Recommended Reading From an Employee-Owned Company
In the 18 months since Mr. Quarrey picked up “Ideas Are Free,” he’s gotten back into business books – largely because of his enthusiastic employees. Web Industries, a Hartford, Conn., manufacturer, is a 100% employee-owned company. “It’s a very weird experience to be in your factory and have people comparing business books they’ve read,” he says.
There are excellent books available that would help you improve your organization. I have mentioned some of my favorite management books before but here some are again: The Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes, Toyota Talent by Jeffrey Liker and David Meier, Six Sigma Beyond the Factory Floor by Ron Snee and Roger Hoerl, Lean Solutions by James Womack and Daniel Jones and The New Economics for Industry, Government, and Education by W. Edwards Deming.
My main suggestion is to read excellent books regardless of when they were written. The Human Side of Enterprise by Douglas McGregor, Fourth Generation Management by Brian Joiner, and many others might not be new but they offer more than almost any new books you will find. There is nothing wrong with excellent new books, just don’t think that because a book is 10 or even 30 years old your organization has already adopted most of the good ideas. In my experience, if more than 20% of the books you read for management ideas in the last few years are less than 5 years old you are making a mistake and would benefit a great deal from reading books written earlier.
Related: Curious Cat management article library - Curious Cat Management Improvement books - Workplace Management review - Ackoff’s New Book, Management f-Laws
How Curiosity Empowers Toyota by Keith McFarland:
For more than 70 years, Toyota’s curiosity has allowed it to build, brick by brick, a commercial fortress. It has scanned the globe for the best ideas—from styling to manufacturing to quality management—and imbued those ideas with a power that often surprises even the people who came up with them in the first place.
Curiosity seems like just what a cat (or company) needs to grow and learn and improve 
Related: Curious Cat management articles - posts on the Toyota Management System - lean manufacturing portal
Data is often displayed poorly, making it difficult to see what is important. When data is displayed well the important facts should leap off the page and into the viewers mind. Edward Tufte is an expert on this topic with great books. If you have not read them, you should: Beautiful Evidence, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information and Visual Explanations.
Smashing magazine has some nice examples of good display techniques in Data Visualization: Modern Approaches. I don’t like all the examples they show but it does provide some help by showing some creative ways to display data.
Related: Edward Tufte’s new book: Beautiful Evidence - Great Charts - Data Visualization Example
Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno is an excellent management book. Taiichi Ohno is known as the father of the Toyota Production System (TPS), also called lean manufacturing. He dictated the text to the Japan Management Association (in a series of interviews in 1982), which gives the book a sense of listening to him talk about the ideas. I found the conversational tone made it very easy to read and reminiscent of Dr. Deming’s tone in many places.
Ohno focused a great deal on the faulty perceptions derived from cost accounting thinking. He discussed the importance of not letting your understanding be clouded by thinking with the accounting mindset. “If you insist on blindly calculating individual costs and waste time insisting that this is profitable of that is not profitable, you will just increase the cost of your low volume products. For this reason there are many cases in this world where companies will discontinue car models that are actually profitable, but are money losers according to their calculations. Likewise, there are cases where companies sell a lot of model that they think is profitable but in fact are only increasing their loses.” page 32
Another area covered in the book is the whole concept of one piece flow (with quick changeovers of equipment, just in time, small lot production…). This is one of the true innovations within the Toyota Production System. I don’t think this book alone can convey how it works and why it is important but this book does a good job of giving another take on these ideas, from the person most responsible for making it work at Toyota.
The book is full of wonderful quotes including:
“There is a sequence for implementing automation that must be followed, even though it is hard. Automation just for its own sake is a problem.” page 81
“If you are observing every day you ought to be finding things you don’t like, and rewriting the standard immediately. Even if the document hanging here is from last month this is wrong.” page 125
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Entrepreneur.com has named their 9 best classic business books of the past 30 years including Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming:
The article includes a section on what to ignore from each book, including for Out of the Crisis - “he was strenuously opposed to incentive pay plans of all types.” Incentive pay plays havoc with teamwork, systems improvement (encouraging sub-optimization), long term thinking, sales volumes (commissions increase variation in sales creating problems for production), shedding light on problems… Ignoring that is not a good idea. Other books they mention include: Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Related: Deming’s ideas on Management - Curious Cat Management Books - Drum-buffer-rope
via: MIT Press Log
Why Toyota Won and How Toyota Can Lose by James Womack
This is another excellent article by Womack. See more articles on lean management by Womack. Reissue addition of the Machine that Changed the World (with revised forward and afterword).
Related: lean manufacturing portal - lean thinking articles - Toyota Production System posts
Jeffrey Pfeffer Testifies to Congress About Evidence-Based Practices:
Great stuff. Read the entire document. via: Bob Sutton’s Work Matters
Related: Evidence-based Management - Illusions - Optical and Other
Books: The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton - Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton
Evolving Excellence - the book takes posts from the excellent Evolving Excellence blog by Keven Meyer and William Waddell. Those familiar with their work know that the authors provide great insight and take strong positions - they are not timid. The book is an enjoyable read and packed with great ideas focused on lean manufacturing and lean management thinking. I enjoyed the different format of reading the material presented in the blog (though I like the blog even better, linking to other resources…, but books have advantages in certain ways).
Another nice feature is since the material is from a living blog, you can visit the blog and find out new thoughts they have posted on areas that you find especially interesting in the book. The blog also includes comments others have shared on the thoughts expressed in the book and links to online resources.
Lean for Software: Interview with Mary Poppendieck:
New book - Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary and Tom Poppendieck.
Related: Competing On The Basis Of Speed (webcast) - Problems Caused by Performance Appraisal
Russell Ackoff is in London promoting his new book: Management f-Laws (see previous post: Ackoff’s F-laws: Common Sins of Management). A BBC article captures some of some of the great ideas from one of his talks (more articles… by Ackoff). How to avoid the fatal F-Laws by Peter Day:
“The average life of a US corporation is only 11-and-a-half years, the rate of bankruptcy is increasing very year. There’s a great deal of evidence that we don’t know how to manage organisations very effectively.
“The F-Laws are simply based on observations over the year about regularities which are destructive to organisations.”
As always he is insightful and not afraid to shake up conventional wisdom.
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More links to interesting management improvement blog posts.
The Elegant Solution: Breakthrough Thinking the Toyota Way (pdf) by Matthew May:
Very worthwhile read. And if you like it try the book - The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation by Matthew E. May and Kevin Roberts. The drumbeat of positive Toyota and Google news just keeps going - and with good reason.
Related: Management Advice Failures - Toyota Production System blog posts - innovation blog posts - CEO Flight Attendant
via: Guy Kawasaki
I received a custom made photo book from my brother. It is amazing. It is a hardcover book, full of photos. The quality is amazing. The book is printed by blurb. Looking on their web site the pricing is surprisingly cheap: 150 page full color hardcover book - $39.95 (for 1 copy! - 10% discount at 25 copies…), as little as $18.95 for a full color softcover book up to 40 pages. The site says books are normally printed in under a week.
I have not tried it but it appears printing your own great looking book is about as easy as creating a blog. I knew it was getting easier to print books, but still I find this very cool. Blurb can import photos from Flickr and Picasa.
Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno, translated by Jon Miller.
Jon Miller posted excellent items to his blog on each chapter. You may pre-order the book now for delivery in March, 2007.
Related: Gemba Keiei by Taiichi Ohno - Kaizen the Toyota Way - Origins of the Toyota Production System - Lean terms defined: Kaizen - Curious Cat Management Improvement Books
10 years of the most innovative ideas in business in not packed with ideas on innovation: it was obviously titled by someone hoping to catch the interest of those following the innovation fad. Still it has interesting stories originally published in Fast Company, including:
How to Give Good Feedback by Seth Godin
The Accidental Guru (on Malcolm Gladwell) by Danielle Sacks
Built to Flip by Jim Collins
A Design for Living by Linda Tischler
and Join the Circus by Linda Tischler
The last one is about Cirque de Soleil which is an innovator (though even in this case it seems better might be more apt than different but maybe I am being too stingy). Read more blog posts on innovation.
Another resource is providing worthwhile lean manufacturing podcasts. The first of an eight video podcast series by Gary Conner is available now. He is author of Lean Manufacturing for the Small Shop (Shingo Prize - winner) is a good introduction to lean manufacturing ideas.
I had some trouble getting the podcast to play properly (it is mp4 format, not mp3): what worked for me was downloading the free: VLC Media Player.
Related: blog posts on management improvement webcasts - Google Videocasts on Customer Focus - Lean Podcast: Bodek
- Lean Blog: Liker
Gary Conner also wrote Six Sigma and Other Continuous Improvement Tools for the Small Shop
Langdon Morris has written a new book: Permanent Innovation. There is a blog and web site too. The book builds upon his article, Business Model Warfare:
Another excellent podcast from the Lean Blog: Dr. Jeffrey Liker.
Dr. Liker discusses the subtleties of doing actually doing lean versus talking about doing lean. Dr. Liker has authored: The Toyota Way, The Toyota Way Fieldbook and The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process And Technology. His consulting firm is: Optiprise.
True lean management is not instant pudding. The more knowledgeable people are about lean practices the less they focus on quick fixes and the more they talk about deep changes. And yet some quick gains are possible. The challenge is to use early gains to build the capacity of the organization for the truly remarkable possible long term gains.
The Risk Pool by Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and Blink):
Pension plans did work well for a short period of time. But recently they (along with the attached retiree health care) are one of the big problems facing large old companies: like GM. Gladwell talks about the dependency ratio for an economy and the dependency ratio of companies. Worsening dependency ratios can cause pension plans to kill companies (if they are not funded when the obligation is incurred) - as the company is forced to pay for more and more retirees with fewer and fewer workers.
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