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.

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

• Team Handbook: Third Edition by Peter R. Scholtes, Brian Joiner, Barbara J. Streibel
  Most recent update to the management classic.

• 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.

• Get Rid of the Performance Review!: How Companies Can Stop Intimidating, Start Managing--and Focus on What Really Matters by Samuel Culbert
  "The performance review. It is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. We all hate it. And yet nobody does anything about it. Until now... Straight-talking Sam Culbert, management guru and UCLA professor, minces no words as he puts managers on notice that -- with the performance review as their weapon of choice -- they have built a corporate culture based on intimidation and fear. Teaming up with Wall Street Journal Senior Editor Lawrence Rout, he shows us why performance reviews are bogus and how they undermine both creativity and productivity. And he puts a good deal of the blame squarely on human resources professionals, who perpetuate the very practice that they should be trying to eliminate. But Culbert does more than merely tear down. He also offers a substitute"

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

• Human Side of Enterprise: 25th Anniversary Printing by Douglas Mc Gregor
  Originally published in 1960. Great book. A classic that is still very worthwhile.

• 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.

• 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.

• Abolishing Performance Appraisals: Why They Backfire and What to Do Instead by Tom Coens, Mary Jenkins
  They take on this difficult topic well. Scholtes, Kohn and others strongly recommend this book.

• 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."

• Toyota Talent: Developing Your People the Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, David Meier
  Toyota Talent walks you through the rigorous methodology used by this global powerhouse to grow high-performing individuals from within. Beginning with a review of Toyota's landmark approach to developing people, the authors illustrate the critical importance of creating a learning and teaching culture in your organization. They provide specific examples necessary to train employees in all areas-from the shop floor to engineering to staff members in service organizations-and show you how to support and encourage every individual to reach his or her top potential. Toyota Talent provides you with the inside knowledge you need to * Identify your development needs and create a training plan * Understand the various types of work and how to break complicated jobs into teachable skills * Set behavioral expectations by properly preparing your workplace * Recognize and develop potential trainers within your workforce * Effectively educate non-manufacturing employees and members of the staff * Develop internal Lean Manufacturing experts

• 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.

• 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.

• Motivation and Personality: by Abraham Maslow
  Maslow expanded on the information he detailed originally in a paper on the hierarchy of human needs. This books explores human psychology from Maslow's look at successful people (where so many psychology books instead focus on those with abnormal [deficient] psychology to draw conclusions about human psychology).

• 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.

• 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.

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.

• 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."

• 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."

• Rounding for Outcomes
  "Rounding for Outcomes is the consistent practice of asking specific questions of key stakeholders—leaders, employees, physicians and patients—to obtain actionable information... The focus of questions during rounding are to: > Build relationships... > Harvest "wins" to learn what is going well... > Identify process improvement areas..."

• Atlassian's Big Experiment with Performance Reviews
  "We incorporated the constructive aspects of reviews in the existing one-on-one meetings. Atlassian managers already have weekly one-on-ones with their team members. Now, every month, one of these meetings is dedicated to a discussion on how the person can enhance their own performance and play to their strengths. Removed the unconstructive focus on ratings and get rid of the distributed curve. 2. Stop paying individual performance bonuses..."

• 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."

• What You Do When Nobody's Looking by Daniel Pink
  "Instead of trying to answer the daunting question of "What's your passion?" it's better simply to watch what you do when you've got time of your own and nobody's looking. That will give you the deepest insights into what you should be doing with your life. Q. What kinds of programs can managers and companies put into place to motivate their workforce? Assuming companies are paying people fairly, they should do what they can to foster autonomy, mastery, and purpose."

• Reward and Incentive Programs are Ineffective -- Even Harmful by Peter R. Scholtes
  "The greatest management conceit is that we can 'motivate' people. We can't. Motivation is there, inside people. Our people were motivated when we hired them and everyday, when they come to work, they arrive with the intention of doing a good job."

• 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)."

• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
  "Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs."

• How I Hire Programmers by Aaron Swartz
  "If all that looks good and I'm ready to hire someone, there's a final sanity check to make sure I haven't been fooled somehow: I ask them to do part of the job. Usually this means picking some fairly separable piece we need and asking them to write it...

• 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."

• 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."

• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham
  "There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. ... When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in."

• The Black Team - Software Testing at IBM
  "Management noticed that certain software testers were 10 to 20 percent better at finding defects than their peers. By putting these people on the same team, they reasoned, they could form a group that would be 10 or 20 percent more effective and then put the team to work testing the most critical system components. It didn't turn out that way. ... Soon the members of team were twice and then dozens of times more effective than their peers, and they began to view their jobs not as testing software, but as breaking software. Team members took a well-deserved pride in their abilities and began to cultivate an image of villainous destroyers. As a group, they began coming to work dressed in black and took to calling themselves "The Black Team.'"

• The Confusing Field of Coaching by Esther Derby
  "the Solution-focused Coaching model assumes that the person being coached has some experience solving the problem for which they have sought coaching. This model assumes that the coachee has all the competencies needed to come to a solution. ... But sometimes, the person needs context, information, demonstration, a straight answer, or a skill."

• 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."

• Toyota's Top Engineer on How to Develop Thinking People by Jon Miller, Taiichi Ohno
  "Mr. Ohno often said to us, 'Don't look with your eyes, look with your feet. Don't think with you head, think with your hands.' He also taught us, 'People who can't understand numbers are useless. The gemba where numbers are not visible is also bad. However, people who only look at the numbers are the worst of all.'"

• 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."

• Eight Reasons Retrospectives Fail by Esther Derby
  "Choosing Actions the Team Doesn’t Have Energy For... They may have tried before and failed, the task may be too difficult or time-consuming given the other work they have to do, or the work may be plain unpleasant. In any case, when the team doesn’t have energy to work on an improvement, chances are pretty good it won’t get done. Go with the task the team has the energy to complete."

• The Trouble with Incentives: They Work by Gipsie Ranney
  "There may be cases in which incentives work only as intended, but I suspect they are relatively rare. The trouble is that we are usually dealing with complex systems (people and organizations) that may behave not at all like our myths would predict...

• A Secret No One Tells New Managers by Wally Bock
  "Controlled confrontation is a key part of being a boss... Your objective is for your team member to leave your meeting thinking about what will change and not how you treated them... Start with the facts. Just the facts. Drain away the adjectives and describe the behavior or performance in neutral language. This should only take a few seconds. Move right on to describing the impact of the performance or behavior that you want to change. Describe the impact in logical and emotional terms."

• Putting Performance Reviews On Probation by Samuel Culbert
  Article and NPR radio show (30 minutes). "It's time to finally put the performance review out of its misery. This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus."

• Are lean principles universal? by Michael Ballé
  "There is only one golden rule: we make people before we make parts. This requires a spirit of challenge, open mind and teamwork, as Pascal Dennis phrased it in his great lean novel Andy and Me. Every industry is different, but all human beings share the same capabilities and potentials – that is universal. As one Sensei once told me, the biggest room is the room for improvement."

• 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.

• Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews by Samuel Culbert
  "It's time to finally put the performance review out of its misery. This corporate sham is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. Everybody does it, and almost everyone who's evaluated hates it. It's a pretentious, bogus practice that produces absolutely nothing that any thinking executive should call a corporate plus."

• 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.

• The Years of Experience Myth by Jeff Atwood
  "It's been shown time and time again that there is no correlation between years of experience and skill in programming. After about six to twelve months working in any particular technology stack, you either get it or you don't... I'm not saying experience doesn't matter in software development. It does. But consider the entire range of a developer's experience, and realize that time invested does not automatically equal skill."

• 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."

• 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..."

• Dr. Demings 1950 Lecture to Japanese Top Management
  "In 1950, Dr. Deming gave a lecture to 80% of the top management people in Japan. What follows is a English translation of the original Japanese transcript. John Dowd made this happen a few years back and has agreed to share it with the Deming Community."

• Hiring for an Agile Team, 4 Reasons to Up Your Hiring Game by Esther Derby
  "In agile teams, people collaborate, negotiate, make trade-offs, handle conflicts. These interactions require a high level of interpersonal skill and emotional intelligence... People on agile teams need an exceptional ability to learn and apply that learning–both in growing 'generalizing specialist' skills and in improving team processes..."

• Dr W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge
  "Improvement requires change. Change requires a plan. Such a plan is a prediction – if we follow this plan, we believe that certain benefits will accrue. Learning comes from observing the implementation, and modifying further iterations of the plan accordingly. Managers in an improving organisation will see themselves as experimenters and as leader of the learning cycle."

• Stop Ignoring the Stalwart Worker
  "Perhaps the defining characteristic of Stalwarts is their aversion to calling attention to themselves — even when they need to. They are like the proverbial wheel that never squeaks — and, consequently, gets no grease. ... The other signature trait of Stalwarts is their deep loyalty to the organization. They are responsible and care deeply about the organization's values, and they generally steer clear of risk. Stalwarts are intrinsically motivated by the service they can render for the good of the organization, and they let their own careers take a backseat to the company's well-being. They feel that they have accomplished something if the company is running like a well-oiled machine."

• 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."

• Respect for People by Jim Womack
  "the manager isn’t a morale booster, always saying, 'Great job!' Instead the manager challenges the employees every step of the way, asking for more thought, more facts, and more discussion, when the employees just want to implement their favored solution. Over time I've come to realize that this problem solving process is actually the highest form of respect."

• Don't Treat People Like You Want to be Treated by John Hunter
  "You should treat people how they want to be treated, not how you want to be treated. "

• 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.

• 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."

• Doing a Job
  by Admiral Hyman Rickover "In my organization, there are no formal job descriptions or organizational charts. Responsibilities are defined in a general way, so that people are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do as they think best and to go to anyone and anywhere for help. Each person then is limited only by his own ability. Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory."

• Managing Fear in the Workplace by Gerald Suarez
  

• Respect for People by Art Smalley
  "The fifth item of my list pertains to development of employee talent over time. Respect for people means developing their latent skills in both on the job and off the job training. It is easy to invest money in new technology, software, or equipment. It takes time, effort, and planning to invest in employee skills development. Canned training programs and Powerpoint slide presentations do not do the job."

• 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..."

• A Little Book of F-laws: 13 common sins of management by Russell L. Ackoff
  Laws include: The more time managers spend trying to get rid of what they don.t want, the less likely they are to get what they do want; Managers who don.t know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. Great, highly recommended.

• 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."

• Managing Nerds
  "Until you've experienced the solving of a seemingly impossible problem, it's hard to understand how far a nerd will go to protect his problem solving focus and you can help. The road to either High is a mental state traditionally called the Zone. There are three things to know about the Zone: 1. The almost-constant quest of the nerd is managing all the crap that is preventing us from entering the Zone as we search for the Highs. Meetings, casual useless fly-bys..."

• A Little Enlightened Self-Interest
  "Great workplaces aren't born from some accidental confluence of motivated workers, bountiful benefits, and dogs in the office. They are created, purposefully, by leaders... Chouinard [Patagonia]: The title of my book is Let My People Go Surfing. It means I don't care when you work. All I care about is that the job gets done and the work is excellent. If you come in at 7 at night because you want to go surfing at 2 in the afternoon, that is fine with me. But it can't impact your fellow workers."

• 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."

• How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem by Dan Mc Carthy
  "Knowing how to sit down with an employee and have an effective conversation about a performance problem is one of the hardest things for any manager to do, new or experienced, and should never be taken for granted. It’s also something that’s often screwed up – managers are either too vague and soft or too blunt and harsh. Both won’t get the desired results – improved performance."

• 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."

• Blame the System
  by Steve LeBlanc - "Once we are free to look at and address where the system has failed us, we can let go of our blame and resentment for our co-workers. I propose that we need blame. We are meaning-seeking creatures and as such, we need to blame someone or something for what went wrong. Blame people and you demoralize them and make them afraid. When you blame the system, no one gets hurt and things gently improve. ... Our job is to improve the system while honoring those who work in and around it. Let’s all just blame the system."

• 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,'"

• 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."

• Bored People Quit by Michael Lopp
  "Boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore. ... Let them experiment. Let them obsess. Let them scratch that itch. If there is no project on their plate that you know is engaging them, create time for them to explore whatever they want to obsess about. I absolutely guarantee there is an investigation somehow related to their work that they are dying to tinker with. The business justification for this wild-ass effort is likely not obvious, so I’ll define it: the act of exploration is as valuable as the act of building. Exploration is hard to justify because it’s hard to measure."

• A Different Perspective on Quality: Bringing Management to Life by H. Thomas Johnson
  Presentation at The Deming Institute. "We truly honor the legacy of Edwards Deming and Gregory Bateson if we begin to recognize that our business and economic organizations should be viewed as life systems, not mechanical systems, and begin to act accordingly. It is time to see these organizations as more than mechanical systems that serve only as instruments of conscious human purpose that we can describe with metaphors from life systems--they are in fact life systems..."

• 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."

• Jeff Bezos Interview by Jeff Bezos
  "I think one thing I find very motivating -- and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation is, I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it's so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of 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."

• Lean Edge by Michael Ballé, H. Thomas Johnson, Daniel T. Jones, Art Smalley, Steven Spear, Jeffrey Liker, Mike Rother
  "Lean management is a method to dramatically improve business performance by teaching people how to improve their own processes. The two main dimensions of lean management are continuous process improvement (going and seeing problems at the source, challenging operations and improving step by step) and respect for people (developing and engaging employees by developing teamwork, problem solving and respect for customers, employees and all other partners). ... The aim of the discussion [on the site] is to share different points of view and to collectively build a vision of lean management."

• Lean HR
  "A discussion of using Lean tools and technology to drive change and streamline processes throughout the HR value stream." by Dwane Lay

• 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, ...

• 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.

• People and Systems
  Blog by José María Raventos (in Spanish).

• 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.

• 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.

• Chief Happiness Officer
  Blog by Alexander Kjerulf. "Work can be energizing, meaningful, inspiring and plain old fun. When it is, we enjoy work more, we enjoy life more and we get more done on the job."

• 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.

• 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.

• HR Capitalist
  "I am most interested in the intersection of the HR practice, technology and business results in today's organizations. I have a strong interest in areas like recruiting and performance management"

• 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.

• Daily Kaizen by Lee Fried
  Blog by Lee Fried tracking the journey of a world-class health care system as it continuously improves to serve its members. He works for Group Health Cooperative non-profit care system in Seattle, Washington.

• Joe and Wanda on Management
  Blog by Nick McCormick exploring management from different perspectives.

• 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.