Management Books

• The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done by Peter R. Scholtes
  Absolutely wonderful book - we give it our highest recommendation.

• Ackoff's Best: Timeless Observations on the Life of Business by Russell L. Ackoff
  From managing teams, maximizing the effectiveness of information systems, and problem solving, to creativity, crime, and the role of the corporation in a democratic society, these writings are a cornucopia of insights, observations, and powerful lessons that will help you improve the effectiveness of your organization.

• Out of the Crisis: by W. Edwards Deming
  A classic but not an easy book to read. Packed with good ideas that still have great merit. New paperback printing (2000).

• The New Economics: For Industry, Government, Education by W. Edwards Deming
  Second Edition (reprint). The best of Deming's books for learning about his system for management. Packed with great thoughts but not as easy to read as the best books. This is a great book, but often it is best for managers already committed to finding new ideas.

• Competing for the Future: by Gary Hamel, C.K. Prahalad
  Hamel and Prahalad caution that complacent managers who get too comfortable in doing things the way they've always done will see their companies fall behind.

• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother
  "Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress—and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture." —Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way

• Fourth Generation Management: The New Business Consciousness by Brian Joiner
  An excellent book for those who wish to begin the transformation to "Fourth Generation Management" and for the experienced as well. We give this well written and easy to follow book this book our highest recommendation.

• The Innovators Solution: by Clayton Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
  

• Leadership Is an Art: by Max De Pree
  Reissue edition.

• The Deming Dimension: by Henry R. Neave
  An excellent overview of the Deming philosphy that is easier to follow that Deming's own books. Provides a valuable historical perspective. Does a good job of explaining the underlining principles of Deming's philosophy.

• 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."

• 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

• 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.

• Leadership and the New Science: by Margaret J. Wheatley
  

• Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John Kotter
  Harvard Business School professor Kotter teams up with executive Rathgeber to offer his contribution to the "business fable" genre. Kotter presents his framework for an effective corporate change initiative through the tale of a colony of Antarctic penguins facing danger-inspired, perhaps, by today's real-life global warming crisis. Under the leadership of one particularly astute bird, a small team of penguins with varied personalities and leadership skills implement a thoughtful plan for coaxing the other birds in their colony through a time of necessary but wrenching change.

• Leading Change: by John Kotter
  Kotter emphasizes a comprehensive eight-step framework that can be followed by executives at all levels. Kotter advises those who would implement change to foster a sense of urgency within the organization. "A higher rate of urgency does not imply everpresent panic, anxiety, or fear." Twenty-first century business change must overcome overmanaged and underled cultures.

• The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America by Warren Buffett
  Great book in Buffett's own words on investing and management.

• 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 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.

• Goal Play!: Leadership Lessons from the Soccer Field by Paul Levy
  The book provides powerful lessons in leadership by drawing on experiences ranging from coaching girls’ soccer to managing the aftermath of catastrophic medical mistakes. How should a top executive communicate with front line staff, and with the outside world? How can a manager nurture great teams while celebrating superstars? How should a leader react when things go wrong… and right? After reading this insightful, unblinkingly honest, and extremely readable book, you’ll have the answers you need to be a more effective mentor, coach, and leader.

Management Articles

• Dee Hock on Management by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Dee Hock
  Absolutely great - definitely read the article. Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

• 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."

• The Gemba Walk by Norman Bodek
  "the plant manager got up from behind his desk. He asked me to join him on his daily walk; in fact he told me that he walked the plant twice a day every day and that it was the most valuable part of his day... The plant manager asked those questions and you could see the excitement on the face of the supervisor as he was answering the questions. I learned that there’s enormous power in the leader asking questions and then just listening – yes; this is the key to ask the question and then to just listen carefully, not judgmentally."

• 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.

• Lean Thinking and Management by John Hunter
  "The biggest thing I think we need to learn from this is that improving management is not easy. The concepts may seem simple but most of us can look around and see much more Dilbert Boss behavior than lean thinking behavior. And the gap between those two types of behavior seems to rise as you go 'up' the organization chart."

• Who Really Cooks the Books? by Warren Buffett
  "For many years, I've had little confidence in the earnings numbers reported by most corporations. I'm not talking about Enron and WorldCom - examples of outright crookedness. Rather, I am referring to the legal, but improper, accounting methods used by chief executives to inflate reported earnings. The most flagrant deceptions have occurred in stock-option accounting and in assumptions about pension-fund returns. The aggregate misrepresentation in these two areas dwarfs the lies of Enron and WorldCom."

• Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work by John Hunter
  "Using the term implies that it one person empowers another person. This is not the correct view. Instead we each play a role within a system. Yes there are constraints on your actions based on the role you are playing. Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building? ... You don't need to think about empowering people if you have a system that lets people take pride in what they do. If you think you need to empower staff, instead fix the system that requires you to think they are in need of empowerment."

• A Systemic View of Transformational Leadership by Russell L. Ackoff
  "Therefore, a transformational leader is one who can produce, or encourage and facilitate the production of, a mobilizing vision of a transformed system. Equally important, the leader must be able to inspire and organize or have organized an effective pursuit of that vision and maintain it even when sacrifices are required."

• Innovation Democracy: W.L. Gore's Original Management Model by Gary Hamel
  "Was it possible to build a company with no hierarchy—where everyone was free to talk with everyone else? How about a company where there were no bosses, no supervisors, no managers and no vice presidents?... Could you create a company with no 'core' business, one that was as focused on creating the future as on preserving the past? The answers to each of these questions was an emphatic "Yes!" And Gore quickly became a model for both organizational and product innovation (not to mention a remarkable business success)."

• 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."

• 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."

• Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big by Jeff Bezos
  "I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need. ... the key is that the company has to experiment, and what you want to try and do is reduce the cost of experimentation so you can do as many experiments per unit time as possible ... and they're not experiments if you know they're going to work."

• 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."

• Managing Fear by Gerald Suarez
  Great article on the damage of fear in organizations and what to do to improve the situation.

• 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."

• The Lean shut-down of Toyota Manufacturing in Australia by James P. Womack
  Toyota again showed their respect for people and commitment to principles with their shut down of manufacturing in Australia. "Toyota accepted the fact that closure of the plant required a transition to new work for most employees and that Toyota needed to take the lead. Senior management understood that its obligation before producing the last car was to manufacture 2,600 upskilled and reskilled employees equipped for new careers."

• Quality in the Community: One City's Experience by George E. P. Box, Laurel W. Joiner, Sue Rohan
  Highlights the evolution of the Quality movement in Madison, Wisconsin and the role of the Madison Area Quality Improvement Network during the 1980's.

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• An Introduction to Deming's Management Ideas by Peter R. Scholtes
  An Introduction to Deming's Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes - webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008.

• 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. "

• The Role of Leadership in Software Development by Mary Poppendieck
  "In this 90-minute talk from the Agile2007 conference, Lean software thought leader Mary Poppendieck reviewed 20th century management theories, including Toyota and Deming, and went on to talk about 'the matrix problem', alignment, waste cutting, planning

• 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."

• Empowerment: The Emperor’s New Clothes by Chris Argyris
  "When it comes to empowerment, executives and employees are engaged in shadowboxing. Management says it wants employees who participate more; employees say they want to be more involved. But it is difficult to know who means what. Is it just a charade? Employees push for greater autonomy; management says the right thing but tries to keep control through information systems, processes, and tools. Employees see vestiges of the old command-and-control model as confirming their worse suspicions—that superiors want unchallenged power. Management just wants to see better numbers. Thus the battle between autonomy and control rages on, and meanwhile, as companies make the transition into the next century, the potential for real empowerment is squandered."

• The Next 25 Years in Statistics by William Hill, William G. Hunter
  (with contributions by Joseph W. Duncan, A. Blanton Godfrey, Brian L. Joiner, Gary C. McDonald, Charles G. Pfeifer, Donald W. Marquardt, and Ronald D. Snee). A transformation of the American style of management has already begun; in order for it to succee

• Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host by Margaret J. Wheatley
  "It is time to face the truth of our situation - that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice - and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities."

• Treat yourself to the best coach you can find–talking lean management with Michael Ballé by Michael Ballé
  The essential steps of becoming a lean leader are first, to lead from the ground up: to spend a lot of time at the gemba, challenging and listening, teaching problem solving and clearing obstacles for employees, encouraging kaizen and learning from people’s initiatives and creativity in order to align the company’s direction with individual fulfillment. The next step is to accept the learn-by-doing discipline of a pull system. Without the tension of the pull system, real problems won’t appear and people will spend their time kaizening irrelevant issues, essentially learning the wrong things. The third step is to understand the importance of teamwork and to learn how to intensify collaboration. Quality of problem solving is mostly dependent on how intense the collaboration between people from different specialties. The key to lean leadership is a gut feeling understanding that every one wants to understand where the company is going and why, and wants to contribute to that goal if not discouraged by silly policies and petty bosses. So the true aim of lean leadership is to enable every employee to partake in the joy of creation by having suggestions to move the business forward in their own job sphere, and implementing these suggestions themselves.

• Manage Better by Managing Less by John Hunter
  It can be tempting to cram your days full of activity to show how hard-working and vital you are. Finding time to think is hard enough; maxing out your capacity makes it next to impossible. Everyone agrees taking time to think is wise. But I have rarely seen managers make it a priority. Managers will say they value it, but they cram schedules so full that they can’t really spend time thinking.

• Dee Hock on Organizations by M. Mitchell Waldrop, Dee Hock
  "An organization's success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be."

• Total Quality Leadership vs. Management by Results by Brian Joiner, Peter R. Scholtes
  Excellent article for those interested in improving management. It begins with a very short early 90's view on the increasing Asian economic clout. Those who are not interested in management improvement would likely be tempted to ignore the important...

• Managing Our Way to Economic Success: Two Untapped Resources by William G. Hunter
  "American organizations could compete much better at home and abroad if they would learn to tap the potential information inherent in all processes and the creativity inherent in all employees."

• Doing More With Less in the Public Sector: A Progress Report from Madison, Wisconsin by William G. Hunter, Jan O'neill, Carol Wallen
  "The new quality improvement ideas can help public officials combat the effects of decreasing budgets just as they help private businesses increase productivity." Published in Quality Progress, July 1987.

• Becoming a Thought Leader
  "Thought leaders love what they do. They personally connect with their topic or area of expertise, and this gives them energy and motivation that sustains them for years. ... Thought leaders give without the expectation of an immediate return. They have a 'no strings attached' attitude that enables them to willingly share insights that serve the needs of others before their own."

• Leaders of People: Some are Wonderful, Some are Clueless. The Rest are Somewhere In Between. by Peter R. Scholtes
  Excellent short article by the author of the Leader's Handbook and the Team Handbook.

• Does anybody give a hoot about profit? by W. Edwards Deming, Henry R. Neave
  Dr W. Edwards Deming gave a short presentation to some 25 executives from major European companies. This document is a transcript prepared and edited by Henry Neave.

• Leading vs. Managing: A False Choice by Bob Sutton
  "I am not rejecting the distinction between leadership and management, but I am saying that the best leaders do something that might properly be called a mix of leadership and management. At a minimum, they lead in a way that constantly takes into account the importance of management. Meanwhile, the worst senior executives use the distinction between leadership and management as an excuse to avoid the details they really have to master to see the big picture and select the right strategies."

• Special Cause Signal Isn’t Proof A Special Cause Exists by John Hunter
  The control chart is a good way to keep us focused on common cause thinking for improvement. It is also very useful in flagging when it is time to immediately start using special cause thinking (since timing is key to effective special cause thinking)...

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..

• The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog by John Hunter
  

• Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog by John Hunter
  Blog by John Hunter on many topics to to improve the management of organizations, including: Deming, lean manufacturing, agile software development, evidence based decision making, customer focus, innovation, six sigma, systems thinking, leadership, psychology, ...

• Evolving Excellence by Kevin Meyer, Bill Waddell
  Excellent and opinionated blog focused on lean manufacturing by Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell.

• Quantum Shifting
  Vision: People all over the world enjoy meaningful and satisfying work by thinking bigger about themselves, their work and the world.

• Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Blog
  Wally Bock writes this blog to give bosses at any level - insight, information, and pointers to resources to do a better job and live a better life.

• Gemba Walkabout by Mike Stoecklein
  “Gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work.

• 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."

• Jamie Flinchbaugh by Jamie Flinchbaugh
  Blog on lean culture, transformational leadership, and entrepreneurial excellence. Jamie is a consultant and co-author of The Hitchhiker.s Guide to Lean: Lessons from the Road.

• 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.

• Improving Police by David C. Couper
  By the former chief of police of Madison, Wisconsin.

• Steven Spear by Steven Spear
  Five-time winner of the Shingo Prize for research excellence and a senior lecturer at MIT and former assistant professor at Harvard. A senior fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, he is the author of numerous articles appearing in academic and trade publications, including the Harvard Business Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.

• Not Running a Hospital by Paul Levy
  Advocate for patient-driven care, eliminating preventable harm, transparency of clinical outcomes, and front-line driven process improvement.

• 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.

• Peter Scholtes by Peter R. Scholtes
  Web site of Peter Scholtes, author of The Leader's Handbook (an excellent book) and The Team Handbook. The site offers several excellent management articles. He taught with Deming. Peter was a good friend and his management ideas are well worth studying.

• 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.