Management Books

• Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability by John Hunter
  The book provides an overview for viewing management as a system. It is largely based on those of Dr. Deming, along with natural outgrowths or extensions of his ideas such as lean manufacturing and agile software development. To achieve great results there must be a continual focus on achieving results today and building enterprise capacity to maximize results over the long term. Managers have many management concepts, pactices and tools available to help them in this quest. The challenge is to create and continually build and improve a management system for the enterprise that leads to success. The book provides a framework for management thinking. With this framework the practices and tools can be applied to build enterprise capacity and improve efficiency and effectiveness.

• Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street by John Brooks
  Bill Gates' favorite business book (Warren Buffett loaned it to him). Read 1 chapter for free (Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox). The book is a compilation of 10 articles published in the New Yorker.

• The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality by W. Edwards Deming, Joyce Orsini
  The book is filled with articles, papers, lectures, and notes touching on a wide range of topics, but which focus on Deming's overriding message: quality and operations are all about systems, not individual performance; the system has to be designed so that the worker can perform well. Published in cooperation with The W. Edwards Deming Institute, The Essential Deming captures Deming's life's worth of thinking and writing. Dr. Orsini provides expert commentary throughout, delivering a powerful, practical guide to superior management. With The Essential Deming, you have the rationale, insight, and best practices you need to transform your organization.

Management Articles

• In the Long Run with Jeff Bezos by Jeff Bezos, Bradford Cross
  "A key part of the focus that Bezos puts on the long term view is the way it combines with innovation, drive and customer focus."

• How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen
  "Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people... Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life's strategy... worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."

• Inside Amazon's Idea Machine: How Bezos Decodes The Customer by Jeff Bezos
  "For Bezos a data-driven customer focus lets him take risks to innovate, secure in the belief that he’s doing the right thing. 'We are comfortable planting seeds and waiting for them to grow into trees,' says Bezos. 'We don’t focus on the optics of the next quarter; we focus on what is going to be good for customers. I think this aspect of our culture is rare.'"

• The Achilles’ Heel of Agile by Jurgen Appelo
  "In the case of shared resources, whether it concerns money, space, or system administrators, someone outside of the development teams must keep an eye on long-term sustainability instead of short-term gains by individual teams. The Tragedy of the Commons is the Achilles’ heel of Agile. It takes management to protect that heel, in order to prevent teams from depleting resources, and crippling the organization."

• Zenjidoka III - Building Excellent People by Norman Bodek
  "Zenjidoka teaches employees (including the dealers) to be self-reliant, empowering them to use every tool and resource at their disposal to immediately investigate and address the customer’s problem... Companies that want to extend quality beyond the factory walls and implement Zenjidoka need to have employees who are skilled enough that they can be trusted with the autonomy to identify and solve customer problems. The development of excellent employees, or Hitozukuri, is necessary to make Zenjidoka work."

• Lay Off the Layoffs by Jeffrey Pfeffer
  "Despite all the research suggesting downsizing hurts companies, managers everywhere continue to do it. That raises an obvious question: why? Part of the answer lies in the immense pressure corporate leaders feel—from the media, from analysts, from peers—to follow the crowd no matter what. ... The facts seem clear. Layoffs are mostly bad for companies, harmful for the economy, and devastating for employees."

• Doing a Job
  by Admiral Hyman Rickover "In my organization, there are no formal job descriptions or organizational charts. Responsibilities are defined in a general way, so that people are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do as they think best and to go to anyone and anywhere for help. Each person then is limited only by his own ability. Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory."

• 3 Reasons Why Layoffs Don't Benefit Hospitals in the Long Run
  "ThedaCare retrains its employees in a similar fashion to Scripps in that it guarantees to help employees find new employment primarily within the health system or elsewhere, and its emphasis on Lean principles has led to very successful retraining efforts. 'The number of people we've redeployed or retrained has varied from as few as 25 to up to 75 per year,' Dr. Gruner says. 'We would like that to be a higher number, not lower, because a higher number means we're doing a better job of identifying waste.'"

• Comparing Lean Principles to the 14 Toyota Principles
  "Toyota Principle #1: Base Your Management Decisions on a Long-Term Philosophy, Even at the Expense of Short-Term Financial Goals. ... Stopping to fix problems puts an organization in a systematic problem solving method (Lean Principle #4) so that bad quality is not passed on and variation is reduced from the system."

• Jobs made Apple great by ignoring profit by Clayton Christensen
  "When the pressure is on and the CEO of a big public company has to choose between doing what’s best for the customer or making the quarter’s numbers… most CEOs will choose the numbers. Apple never has... Profitability isn’t at the center of every decision. Apple's focus is on making truly great products — products so great that its own employees want to use them. That philosophy has made Apple one of the most innovative companies in the world."

• Disruptive Innovation by Clayton Christensen
  Excellent long article (a book chapter) on the topic by the expert. "Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don’t attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers. Once the disruptive product gains a foothold in new or low-end markets, the improvement cycle begins. And because the pace of technological progress outstrips customers’ abilities to use it, the previously not-good-enough technology eventually improves enough to intersect with the needs of more demanding customers."

• Knowledge workers are the new capitalists by Peter Drucker
  "knowledge workers are highly mobile within their specialism. They think nothing of moving from one university, one company or one country to another, as long as they stay within the same field of knowledge. There is a lot of talk about trying to restore knowledge workers' loyalty to their employing organisation, but such efforts will get nowhere. Knowledge workers may have an attachment to an organisation and feel comfortable with it, but their primary allegiance is likely to be to their specialised branch of knowledge."

• Profit = Market Price - Actual Cost or Price = Cost + Desired Profit by John Hunter
  "Apple would probably sell very few iPhones for $2,000 more than they cost today. How many they would sell at $100 more or $100 less may change significantly but they would still be huge sellers at either of those prices. So that "market sets the price" idea is not 100% accurate (I don't think anyway). ... Pricing decisions also have big long term versus short term considerations. Apple has started pricing many things in a way which makes it hard for competitors to undercut them. Apple, almost for sure could charge more for the laptops they sell and the iPad and iPhone. But if they did they make it easier for a competitor to compete on price. This pricing decision is an Apple decision not a market decision."

• Eager to Stay and Ready to Go by Dan Mc Carthy
  "5. Build marketable skills. Every job and every project is an opportunity to learn. A good rule of thumb would be for 20% of your job to be new and different each year. Work with your manager to develop an individual development plan (IDP) that provides you opportunities to stretch and grow. ... 9. Build your personal brand. It used to be the only way you could get known outside your company was to speak at a conference or get published. Now, with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and online communities, everyone has the opportunity to have thousands of people get to know them."

• Ten Lessons From a Maker
  by David Hieatt. "A business has to find its feet. Knowledge has to be learned. Skills have to refined. Reputations have to be earned. Customers have to be found and retained. A business will tell you when it wants to grow, and when it does, let go of the reigns. But not too much. One of the most important aspects to building a business is patience. It is a rare commodity."

• Why Lean Programs Fail by Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "a large survey conducted by Industry Week in 2007 found that only 2 percent of companies achieved their anticipated results... When we look at lean in this way it is not only a set of techniques for eliminating waste, but a process by which managers as leaders develop people so that desired results can be achieved, again and again. That means coaching people in practicing an improvement kata every day."

• How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted by John Hunter
  "Often when learning about Deming’s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSA… people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

• Foundations For Transformation: Linking Purpose, People and Process by Mike Stoecklein
  "Nearly all organizations have attempted some type of company-wide improvement effort, and most managers and workers in organizations have experienced attempts to introduce and implement different management approaches. The experience for most people has been a series of programs (flavors of the month1) rather than the pursuit of a philosophy of improvement. We have observed predictable patterns in companies that pursue company-wide improvement from nearly all industries and share them in this paper. The foundations for transformation can be applied to not only business, but also government and education."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter by John Hunter, William G. Hunter
  George Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters. Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
  The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

• The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog by John Hunter