Management Books

• Toyota Under Fire: Lessons for Turning Crisis into Opportunity by Jeffrey Liker
  Toyota Under Fire, 2011 Shingo Prize Winner, takes you beyond the headlines and into the offices and factories of Toyota to reveal the truth behind the company's highly publicized and controversial recall of over 10 million vehicles.

• The Lean Startup: by Eric Ries
  Great book that is also very popular in general management circles and software development circles (the software development and startup areas overlap so much today that this is no surprise). The book focuses on applying lean thinking ideas in an entrepreneurial setting. So the book focuses on quick success and customer focus. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or those in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility and quickly. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

• Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones
  "few companies today see consumption as a process -- a series of linked goods and services, all of which must occur seamlessly for the consumer to be satisfied. Buying a home computer, for example, involves researching, purchasing, integrating..."

• 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.

• Gemba Walks: by Jim Womack
  This book complies Womack's essays on the practice of lean and adds some additional context to the essays.

• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh
  "Pay new employees $2000 to quit. Make customer service the entire company, not just a department. Focus on company culture as the #1 priority. Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business. Help employees grow both personally and professionally. Seek to change the world. Oh, and make money too. Sound crazy? It's all standard operating procedure at Zappos.com, the online retailer that's doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales every year."

Management Articles

• A Systemic Approach for Improving An Organization - That Makes a Difference to the Customer by Dave Nave
  "Management's job in the area of improvement is to create and facilitate an environment for learning and cooperation. One area to start is to remove policies and barriers that inhibit people from doing a good job. At the same time, encourage communication...

• Genchi Genbutsu Case Study: how it helped Toyota winGenchi Genbutsu Case Study: how it helped Toyota win a multi-million dollar contract by Karn Bulsuk
  "He explained: 'Have you noticed that the Malaysia highways all use a much older, but cheaper version of noise absorbing wall?' Our team shook our heads. 'That's the problem. They can't afford this yet. It's true that our offering is superior to what the Malaysians are using, but economic reality is the reality that we live with.'"

• Theo Albrecht, Trader Joe's, and Ruthless Focus by Wally Bock
  "When you've got a strategy that works, stay with it. That frees your people up to lavish innovation on the strategy. It helps you concentrate your resources and your efforts."

• 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.'"

• Zenjidoka - A Simple Tool for a Complex Problem by Norman Bodek
  "Had the tools of the Toyota Production System been extended from the factory floor worker to every employee who makes contact with the customer, Toyota could have dramatically reduced the resulting financial impact and human tragedy. ... Zenjidoka is a new word meaning "Total Jidoka." Instead of confining Jidoka to the factory floor, Zenjidoka extends Jidoka to every employee who has any contact with the end customer."

• 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."

• Six Drucker Questions that Simplify a Complex Age by Peter Drucker, Rick Wartzman
  "What does the customer value? This “may be the most important question,” Drucker advised. “Yet it is the one least often asked.” This insight is especially relevant in an age where customers have more power and choice than ever before. ... But today, when knowledge work is predominant, tasks can be far more difficult to define. There is often no specific way for a knowledge worker to tackle an assignment. He or she typically has enormous discretion over what steps to take (and which ones not to take), and in what order to take them..."

• Starbucks, Queueing Theory, Constraints, and Lean by Peter Abilla
  "If establishing a consistent order fulfillment drumbeat is important, Starbucks needs to do the following: 1) Reduce, immediately, the number of product combinations. 2) Model the properties of each of those combinations in both time, material, information, steps, and flow. But, focus on the 80/20 – the most ordered combinations first..."

• Interview of and by Dr. Ackoff and Dr. Deming by Russell L. Ackoff, Clare Crawford Mason, W. Edwards Deming
  Great stuff. The transcript spells Dr. Ackoff's name wrong (Akoff). They discuss the important of viewing organizations as systems and a fair amount of time on the problems with business school education in the USA. And they touch on a huge number of management topics. Dr. Deming "When one understands who depends on me, then I may take joy in my work." Dr. Ackoff "If there isn't join in work, you won't get productivity, and you won't get quality."

• 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."

• Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars
  "We have adapted our personalization algorithms to this new scenario in such a way that now 75% of what people watch is from some sort of recommendation. We reached this point by continuously optimizing the member experience and have measured significant gains in member satisfaction whenever we improved the personalization ... Our business objective is to maximize member satisfaction and month-to-month subscription retention, which correlates well with maximizing consumption of video content. We therefore optimize our algorithms to give the highest scores to titles that a member is most likely to play and enjoy."

• Being Responsive is Critical for Successful Customer Development
  "Customers can be quite forgiving. But what they won’t tolerate is being ignored. Even the feeling or inkling of being ignored can set customers into a rage; and worse, have them looking for alternative solutions to yours. The way to avoid this is simple: Be Responsive."

• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's
  "All of that can lead to a better customer experience. A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don't have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he'll walk you over instead of just saying 'aisle five.' Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try."

• A Management, Leadership, and Board Road Map to Transforming Care for Patients by John Toussaint
  "This article offers an alternative approach: management by process—an operating system that engages frontline staff in decisions and imposes standards and processes on the act of managing. Organizations that have adopted management by process have seen quality improve and costs decrease because the people closest to the work are expected to identify problems and solve them. Also detailed are the leadership behaviors required for an organization to successfully implement the management-by-process operating system and the board of trustees’ role in supporting the transformation."

• What I Learned From Building An App For Low-Income Americans
  "To some extent technology has failed low-income Americans too. Developers don’t build apps for them. Growth hackers ignore them. At Significance Labs, I learned a lot about how low-income Americans live and use technology but also about its limitations, and my own. ... During a user testing session with a group of Spanish-speaking cleaners, one of the testers gave a speech to the others about how we were a company (Significance Labs is a nonprofit) trying to take advantage of them. When building for low-income users you have to work harder to win their trust and to demonstrate your product’s value. ... I am also convinced that there are sustainable, if not wildly profitable, businesses to be built on providing valuable services to low-income Americans."

• Ten Questions with Jeffrey Pfeffer by Guy Kawasaki, Jeffrey Pfeffer
  Interview by Guy Kawaasaki. "companies often ignore the interdependence or connections between actions in one part and those in another. So, even as some departments are trying to cut the costs of benefits, others are worried about recruiting and retaining enough qualified people. Maybe the parts should work together. Third, many companies presume that incentives are the answer to everything, and have a very mechanistic model of human behavior. That is also incorrect."

• The Laws of Subtraction by Matthew May
  "Everywhere, there’s too much of the wrong stuff, and not enough of the right. The noise is deafening, the signal weak. Everything is too complicated and time-sucking. Welcome to the age of excess everything. Success in this new age looks different, and demands a new and singular skill: Subtraction. Subtraction is defined simply as the art of removing anything excessive, confusing, wasteful, unnatural, hazardous, hard to use, or ugly—and the discipline to refrain from adding it in the first place."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Management and Leadership Quotes by John Hunter
  Quotes on management, business, leadership and many related topics: innovation, problems solving, change, statistics, planning, motivation, etc..

• Signal vs. Noise
  Blog on design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture and software development.

• The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog by John Hunter
  

• W. Edwards Deming Institute by W. Edwards Deming
  Founded by W. Edwards Deming the institute carries forward his philosophy. The site includes information on the institutes annual conferences and offers newsletters online.

• in2in by Bill Bellows
  Offer an annual conference along with ongoing learning opportunities focused on the management ideas of Deming and Ackoff. I, John Hunter, think this is a good conference.

• Not Running a Hospital by Paul Levy
  Author is a former hospital CEO and an "advocate for patient-driven care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement."

• Management Wisdom by Clare Crawford Mason, W. Edwards Deming, Robert Mason
  Home of the Deming Library tapes and Better Management for a Changing World (with Ackoff and Suarez).

• 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.