Management Books

• Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  Drawing on hundreds of interviews with exceptional people, from biologists and physicists to politicians and business leaders to poets and artists, the author uses his famous "flow" theory to explain the creative process.

• Transforming Health Care Leadership: A Systems Guide to Improve Patient Care, Decrease Costs, and Improve Population Health by Cliff Norman
  "The authors of this book provide the necessary tools for health care leaders to build a learning organization that can make the Triple Aim a reality—better patient care, at lower per-capita cost, while learning to improve population health." — Donald M. Berwick

• Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst by Bob Sutton
  If you are a boss who wants to do great work, what can you do about it? Good Boss, Bad Boss is devoted to answering that question. Stanford Professor Robert Sutton weaves together the best psychological and management research with compelling stories and cases to reveal the mindset and moves of the best (and worst) bosses.

• No Contest: The Case Against Competition by Alfie Kohn
  This is the revised edition of the book first published in 1986. A book that makes you think and challenges many strongly held ideas. Very worthwhile.

• Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink
  Research based exploration of motivation and no surprise it supports Douglas McGregor's The Human Side of Enterprise written 50 years ago. Managers should treat employees as intrinsically motivated and seek to eliminate the barriers to that intrinsic motivation - not seek to increase extrinsic motivation.

Management Articles

• 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Bob Sutton
  "My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods."

• 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."

• 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."

• Clearing Up Myths About the Deming Cycle by Ron Moen, Cliff Norman
  "This new approach provides a basic framework for developing, testing and implementing changes to the way things are done that will lead to improvement."

• Lean Knowledge Work
  by Bradley Staats and David M. Upton. "our research in IT, financial, engineering, and legal services reveals that such work can in fact benefit from the principles of the Toyota Production System. For one thing, a substantial amount of knowledge assumed to be tacit doesn’t have to be; it can be articulated and captured in writing if the organization makes the effort to pull it out of people’s heads. For another, all knowledge work includes some activities that have nothing to do with applying judgment and can be streamlined by training employees to continually find and root out waste. Even when knowledge is genuinely tacit, creating systems and rules to guide workers’ interactions can lead to more-effective collaboration."

• 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."

• 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."

• Why Good People Do Bad Things
  "The researchers ran a number of fascinating field experiments to test whether subtle signs of disorder in the environment could create bad behavior in other domains. ... The research I’ve described to this point demonstrated that when people observe that their peers have violated one social norm, they are more likely to violate a related but different social norm."

• The Peter Principle Revisited: A Computational Study
  "Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly the best and the worst members in terms of competence."

• 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."

Management Web Sites and Resources

• Lean Enterprise Institute by Jim Womack
  "We carefully develop hypotheses about lean thinking and experiment to see which approaches work best in the real world. We then write up and teach what we discover, providing new methods for organizational transformation. We strive to answer the simple question of every manager, "What can I do on Monday morning to make a difference in my organization?" And, by creating a strong Lean Community through our website and public events we try to give managers the courage to become lean change agents."

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Articles by John Hunter
  Hundreds of useful management articles hand selected to help managers improve the performance of their organization. Sorted by topic including: Deming, lean manufacturing, six sigma, continual improvement, innovation, leadership, managing people, software development, psychology and systems thinking.

• 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.

• Work Matters by Bob Sutton
  

• Management Innovation eXchange
  "an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: while "modern" management is one of humankind's most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age. Current management practices emphasize control, discipline and efficiency above all else — and that's a problem. To thrive in the 21st century, organizations must be adaptable, innovative, inspiring and socially accountable. That will require a genuine revolution in management principles and practices."