Management Books

• SPC at the Esquire Club: by Donald J. Wheeler, Kaz Koike
  A unique and interesting case study. Another example of how versatile Quality tools are. To us this is one of the best illustrations that the often heard "it can't work here" is most likely an inaccurate statement.

• 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

• Achieving Total Customer Satisfaction Through Six Sigma by Jane Erwin
  An article from Quality Digest.

• 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."

• 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 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.'"

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 1999 Ritz-Carlton Baldrige Application Summary
  "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen." That is Ritz's motto. And they provide an excellent example of using a vision to drive corporate behavior. Unlike most ignored visions this one drives how the Ritz is managed.

Management Web Sites and Resources

• 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.

• 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, ...

• 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.

• ITSM Professor
  Blog on IT Service Management by Lisa Schwartz, Jayne Groll and Ross Wise.

• qBlog
  Blog by the Office of Quality Management at National University of Singapore.