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.

• 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.

• The Company That Solved Health Care: by John Torinus
  "Serigraph, Inc., a Wisconsin manufacturer, took innovative steps to curtail the costs. By giving their employees a stake in the financial outcome of health care, they cut their costs drastically. Torinus, president of the company, outlines steps that any business can take to achieve similar results, which involve a major shift in behavior on the part of the insured employees."

• Management f-Laws: How Organizations Really Work by Russell L. Ackoff, Herbert J. Addison
  A full collection of more than 80 of Russell Ackoff's management f-laws: the uncomfortable truths about how organizations really work, what's wrong with the way we design and manage businesses, what makes managers tick... and how we can make things work better.

• 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.

• Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: with 40 New Management f-Laws by Russell L. Ackoff, Herbert J. Addison, Jamshid Gharajedaghi
  Finished just before Professor Ackoff's death late in 2009, Systems Thinking for Curious Managers opens the door to a joined up way of thinking about things that has profoundly influenced thinkers and doers in the fields of business, politics, economics, biology, psychology. Although Systems Thinking was 'invented' early in the 20th century, even Peter Senge's best-selling "The Fifth Discipline" (Systems Thinking is the fifth discipline) failed to popularize the term. But now, in business and academia, in the public sector and in the search for solutions to the environmental problems we face, Systems Thinking is being talked about everywhere. This timely book presents 40 more of Russ Ackoff's famously witty and incisive f-Laws (or flaws) of business - following on from his 2007 collection "Management f-Laws". All those in this collection are new and previously unpublished. Andrew Carey's extended introduction ties these f-Laws into the rest of Ackoff's work and gives the reader new to Systems Thinking a practical guide to the implications of Systems Thinking for organisations and managers.

• The Lean Turnaround:
  Art Byrne has been implementing Lean strategy in various U.S.-based manufacturing and service companies, such as Danaher Corporation, for more than 30 years, including The Wiremold Company, which he ran for 11 years.

• Maslow on Management: by Abraham Maslow
  In 1962, Maslow spent the summer at an electronics factory that was one of the first to try giving workers a say in organizing production. He watched and kept a journal. The book was republished with extensive commentaries as Maslow on Management in 1998. Some of Maslow on Management is, as Warren Bennis writes in the foreword, "hilariously innocent."

• Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler
  An excellent guide to what you must understand about variation to effectively improve your organization.

• 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.

Management Articles

• Lean accounting: a few key lessons from Wiremold
  "companies often don’t understand lean because their CFOs don’t. ... lean doesn’t need the “support” of top management, whatever that means; it needs active, hands-on “doing” leadership. At Wiremold we used to organize “President’s kaizens” in which all executives participated, together with the workers in one of our facilities. That is more than just support!"

• When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule by Vivek Wadhwa
  "Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40."

• 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."

• 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."

• Why I Run a Flat Company by Jason Fried
  "At 37signals, however, we have a different position on ambition. We're not big fans of what I consider 'vertical' ambition—that is, the usual career-path trajectory, in which a newbie moves up the ladder from associate to manager to vice president over a number of years of service. On the other hand, we revere "horizontal" ambition—in which employees who love what they do are encouraged to dig deeper, expand their knowledge, and become better at it. We always try to hire people who yearn to be master craftspeople, that is, designers who want to be great designers, not managers of designers; developers who want to master the art of programming, not management."

• Seeing Your Company as a System by Andrea Gabor
  "The recognition that a company is a complex social system and a living community has been an underlying theme of leading management thinkers as far back as the early 20th century. Nevertheless, the machine continues to be the dominant metaphor for business leaders, many of whom seek to solve their problems by 'pulling levers' or 'pushing buttons': making large-scale changes without a clear feeling for how those changes will affect the collective action of the company. The speed and complexity of the global business environment calls for a new appreciation of a systems-focused view of the world, one that recognizes the interrelationships of people, processes, and decisions — and designs organizational actions accordingly."

• Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
  The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.

• 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."

• Teachers Cheating and Incentives by Dan Ariely
  "they began to do anything that would improve their performance on that measure even by a tiny bit—even if they messed up other employees in the process. Ultimately they were consumed with maximizing what they knew they would be measured on, regardless of the fact that this was only part of their overall responsibility."

• Building a Great Software Development Team by John Hunter
  "Passion for the right things, based on what we aimed to be, mattered a great deal. That took the form of being passionate about the user experience, being passionate about good software development practices, being passionate about good software itself, being passionate about treating each other with respect, being passionate about learning and improving. I think there were several other important factors, such as: the skill to turn a passion for good software into actual good software..."

• 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."

• Executive Superstars, Peer Groups and Over-Compensation – Cause, Effect and Solution
  "theories of optimal market-based contracting are misguided in that they are predicated upon the chimerical notion of vigorous and competitive markets for transferable executive talent... independent and shareholder-conscious compensation committees must develop internally created standards of pay based on the individual nature of the organization concerned, its particular competitive environment and its internal dynamics."

• A Radical Prescription for Sales by Daniel Pink
  "If-then rewards turn out to be far less effective for complex, creative, conceptual endeavors (what psychologists call heuristic work). Think inventing a new product or working with a client to tackle a problem neither of you has confronted before. For those projects, you need a broader perspective, which, research shows, can be inhibited by if-then rewards."

• The Promise of Lean in Health Care by John Toussaint
  "Health care cases reveal that Lean is as applicable in complex knowledge work as it is in assembly-line manufacturing. When well executed, Lean transforms how an organization works and creates an insatiable quest for improvement. In this article, we define Lean and present 6 principles that constitute the essential dynamic of Lean management: attitude of continuous improvement, value creation, unity of purpose, respect for front-line workers, visual tracking, and flexible regimentation. ... Lean is a journey, not a destination. Unlike specific programs, Lean has no finish line. Creating a culture of Lean is to create an insa- tiable appetite for improvement; there is no turning back."

• 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."

• A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors
  by Abraham Wald

• How to Be Startup CEO
  Long article with many good ideas. "In my experience the three most important components of the Start-up CEO’s role are: 1) Creating a product that solves a real customer need (and convincing customers to pay for it). 2) Making sure your users and customers have an extremely positive emotional experience with your product. 3) Recruiting a great team to build your product."

• 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."

• America's dysfunctional patent system is stifling innovation
  "At the heart of the problem – and we should keep this squarely in mind – is a federal machine that, willy-nilly, grants patents that never should have been allowed in the first place. It is a machine created and run by lawyers, for lawyers, and which has absolutely no incentive to reform itself."

• Profound Knowledge: A New Synthesis from a Transcending Perspective to Personal Improvement by Clare Crawford Mason
  "We are all familiar with the systems diagram Dr. Deming put on the blackboard in l950 to show the Japanese industrial leaders that manufacturing was a system and should include the customer and supplier and be continually improved. I think of this drawing as a revolutionary artifact like Newton's falling apple and James Watt's mother's tea kettle. All involve ideas that changed the world. "

• Performance Reviews Are Obsolete
  The CEO of Catapult Systems explains their elimination of the annual performance appraisal. "the most critical flaw of our old process was that the feedback itself was too infrequent and too far removed from the actual behavior to have any measurable impact on employee performance. ... I decided to completely eliminate of our annual performance review process and replace it with a real-time performance feedback dashboard."

• In a cutthroat world, some Web giants thrive by cooperating
  "Convinced that capitalism's adversarial nature would disrupt employee teamwork, the 20th-century architects of modern management adapted the military's chain-of-command model for the corporate leadership chart. Frederick Taylor, the intellectual father of industrial management, contended that the inevitable conflicts between peers required the authority of a superior to arbitrate. ... Tech start-ups ignored the old-style model. Instead, employees at Facebook, Google and Twitter work in semiautonomous teams, usually made up of experts from each department: design, programming, marketing, etc. ... 'The difference in thinking between Silicon Valley and others places is that you compete one moment and you cooperate the next moment,'"

• 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..."

• 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."

• The Equally Important “Respect for People” Principle by Bob Emiliani
  "The 'Respect for People' principle encompasses all key stakeholders: employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and communities. Thus, rather than representing a single dyad, the 'Respect for People' principle is a multilateral expression of the need for balanced, mutually respectful relationships, cooperation, and co-prosperity with these key stakeholders."

• 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."

• 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..."

• Eight guidelines for closing the knowing-doing gap by Jason Yip
  "Why before How: philosophy is important. Focus on Why (philosophy, general guidance) before How (detailed practices, behaviours, techniques) ... Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts. Ready, fire, aim. Act even if you haven't had the time to fully plan the action..."

• Charlie Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgement
  "Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine. ... you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens. "

• 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."

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop
  "Flowers, as everyone knows, are among the freshest, most perishable objects on earth. Which is why fresh flowers are placed right up front--to "prime" us to think of freshness the moment we enter the store. Consider the opposite--what if we entered the store and were greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers?"

• 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."

• 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.'"

Management Web Sites and Resources

• 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
  

• 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.

• Manufacturing Leadership Center by Bill Waddell
  Bill Waddell shares his knowledge, opinions, experience and ideas to point out the failures of companies, organizations, and individuals in the manufacturing industry while also lauding those that understand true excellence.

• Startup Lessons Learned by Eric Ries
  By the author of the very popular book: Lean Startup.