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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.
The Wall Street Journal has a book review of The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart. The book flushes out the ideas Matthew Stewert explored in a previous article in the Atlantic about the failure of management to mature as a discipline.
I’m not sure about the book, I have not read it but that is a great statement. And I firmly believe managers need to become experts at managing and by and large they have quite a long way to go. Dr. Deming talked about how we “know” what we know in the aspect of his management called the theory of knowledge (which is not included in any other management philosophy I have seen). That area (with interactions in other areas) explores why people often believe what is not so. And management seems to have a surplus of beliefs that are not based on sound theories.
Read this good article I have mentioned before on this topic by Carlie and Christensen: The Cycles of Theory Building in Management Research.
Related: Righter Incentivization – Another Quota Failure Example – Management Advice Failures – Why Extrinsic Motivation Fails – Innovation Strategy – Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete? – Data Based Blathering – Doing the Wrong Things Righter – Harvard’s Masters of the Apocalypse
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In-N-Out Burger’s six secrets for out-and-out success
“They believed in sharing their success with their employees,” says Perman, noting that In-N-Out associates make $10 an hour working part-time and starting store managers make $100,000, plus bonuses tied to store performance. The company benefits package is also generous. Such treatment engenders loyalty from workers.
“They have the lowest turnover rate in the fast food industry, which is notorious for turnover,” says Perman. “They say that the average manager’s tenure is 14 years, but they have managers who have been there 30 or 40 years.”
Keep Things Simple and Consistent…
The fundamental idea of respecting people is something most executives seem to have no interest in. Treating employees as the critical partners in organizational success is just something that doesn’t leap out at you based on the actions of most managers, unfortunately. And that poor management damages the performance of the organization.
Read more about In-N-Out Burger management practices in Stacy Perman’s new book In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules.
Related: Respect for Workers at In-N-Out Burger (Nov 2006) – Building a Great Workforce – Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – People are Our Most Important Asset
Photo of Jeff Bezos during the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by James Duncan.Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, is working for a week in Amazon’s Kentucky distribution center. I hope, and based on his past, I believe, that he is going to the gemba (Genchi Genbutsu) to learn more about how Amazon operates. That would be great.
He worked on wall street and understands the fake constraints they attempt to put companies (you must focus on short term profits, you must focus on pleasing wall street analysts not customers…). He understood the importance of managing cash flow and the unimportance of short term profits. And he understands the importance of customer focus. He understands lean thinking. We need more CEO’s like him.
“He is there to work,” Smith said, “and, unfortunately, we are just not scheduling any interviews while he is in town.”
Local Amazon employees say Bezos is working in the warehouse with the company’s hourly employees to see what they do and hear their comments about their work. Most CEOs would benefit from spending a few days on the shop floor.
Once again his actions indicate he is the type of CEO I want to invest in.
via: Jeff Bezos Works In Kentucky Distribution Center For A Week
Related: Jeff Bezos and Root Cause Analysis – Management by Walking Around – Amazon Innovation – Amazon’s Amazing Achievement – Louisville Slugger, Deming Practices – Management Excellence
W. Edwards Deming
Page 182, Out of the Crisis
More of Deming on Innovation
Related: Innovation Thinking with Clayton Christensen – Engineering Innovation – Managing Innovation – Gary Hamel on Management Innovation
Statistics for Experimenters, second edition, by George E. P. Box, J. Stuart Hunter and William G. Hunter (my father) is now available in Spanish.
Read a bit more can find a bit more on the Spanish edition, in Spanish. EstadĂstica para Investigadores Diseño, innovaciĂłn y descubrimiento Segunda ediciĂłn.
Statistics for Experimenters – Second Edition:
Book available via Editorial Reverte
Related: Statistics for Experimenters Review – Correlation is Not Causation – Statistics for Experimenters Data – posts on design of experiments
Low-Tech, High Impact Innovation
Great post. My father, Dr. William Hunter, did a great deal of work with appropriate technology (he was a chemical engineering, industrial engineering and statistics professor) and in management improvement.
Often the failure to adopt appropriate technology solutions results from a combination of 3 things:
Thinking about why appropriate technology is so effective, but underutilized can help anyone improve the solutions they adopt. Thankfully the adoption of appropriate technology solutions has been increasing over the last few decades.
I would especially encourage people to stop looking for the newest management book and actually read and adopt and then re-read and… the excellent management books from the last 50 years. Stop chasing some new shiny thing and adopt solutions that are effective – even if they seem boring.
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Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne’s Enterprise Thinking Network Ongoing Discussion series this month features conference calls with Peter Scholtes (Thursday, September 25th, Noon to 2pm Pacific Time – USA) and Brian Joiner (Friday the 26th, Noon to 2pm Pacific Time – USA). See more details and register online.
Peter’s books (The Team Handbook and The Leader’s Handbook) are thought pieces for Thursday’s conversation with Peter. As a place to begin the conversation with Peter, we might consider the possibility that teamwork and leadership are perhaps even more in our awareness today than when Peter wrote these books. And if you’d like to explore more of Peter’s thinking and writing, see also a variety of articles and letters by and about Peter at his website.
Brian has offered us several Thought Pieces related to his current work. According to Brian, “The thing I am most excited about now is the Transition Towns movement which started in the UK a few years ago. It’s what I will be focusing on once the First Unitarian Society green building is effectively launched.” In addition, the following site gives a brief intro to the Transition Town approach, with much more detail on the Transition approach available in their Primer. Says Brian, “I hope this will be enough to start conversations.”
Both Brian and Peter are from Madison, Wisconsin (where I grew up) and both worked with my father: Bill Hunter. Brian Joiner also wrote Fourth Generation Management and co-authored the Team Handbook with Peter.
Related: Curious Cat Essential Management Books – Brain Joiner on Dr. Deming – Total Quality Leadership vs. Management by Control by Brian L. Joiner and Peter R. Scholtes
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
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