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.

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Thomas Nolan, Cliff Norman, Lloyd Provost
  See the second edition of this handbook. Great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement.

• 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.

• 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.

• Quality Improvement Through Planned Experimentation: 2nd Edition by Thomas Nolan, Lloyd P. Provost, Ron Moen
  An excellent handbook on how to use experiments to learn about your organization and how to use that knowledge to improve your organization. The book integrates Dr. Deming's ideas and design of experiments thinking. Forward by W. Edwards Deming. 3rd edition is on the way.

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

• 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.

• The Improvement Guide: A Practical Approach to Enhancing Organizational Performance by Gerald J. Langley, Ron Moen, Thomas Nolan, Cliff Norman, Lloyd Provost
  Second edition of this great handbook for process improvement. The best resource for applying the plan-do-study-act cycle to improvement. Highly recommended

• 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.

• Tool Time Handbook 1.0 for Lean: by David P. Langford
  Co-authored by David P. Langford and Sarah Pavelka, this spiral bound handbook is an excellent resource. It is written in an easy-to-understand format with diagrams and explanations of 23 Lean Quality Improvement Tools and their suggested uses. You'll understand how Lean tools can successfully be applied to the 9 Step PDSA Improvement Process (Plan-Do-Study-Act Process). Our goal was simplicity. Each tool has a process explanation and is graphically represented. All of the Lean Quality Learning tools are also referenced to the 9 Step PDSA cycle for fast tool selection and implementation. This enables you to spend less time selecting tools and more time learning how, when and where to use them. Tool Time for Lean books are being used by students, administrators, board members, personnel staff, healthcare professionals, and business leaders, as well as by employees from schools, universities, corporations, hospitals, and government agencies.

Management Articles

• Robust Experimental Strategies for Improving Upstream Productivity by Ronald D. Snee
  The solution to this problem is to use Lean principles to streamline the processes and procedures used to do the experimental work. Eliminating complexity and wasted time and effort results in experimentation being speeded up and scientists having more time to do creative work.

• Scientific Method and Continual Improvement by David Kerridge, Sarah Kerridge
  An excellent artilce on how the scientific method should be applied to improve the management of human systems.

• Actionable Metrics by John Hunter
  "Metrics are valuable when they are actionable. Think about what will be done if certain results are shown by the data. If you can't think of actions you would take, it may be that metric is not worth tracking."

• How An Aeron Chair Gets Built Every 17 Seconds
  "At Herman Miller, they average 1,200 'plan-do-check acts'--that is, little proposed changes to the assembly process--ever year. ... A decade ago, an Aeron took more than 600 seconds in total to build. Today, it’s about 340. Meanwhile, safety metrics have improved by a factor of 6. Quality metrics have improved by a factor of 10. A single Aeron takes one fifth of the labor to make that it once did. The actual factory itself is 10 times smaller. Today, Herman Miller is doing far more with the same labor force that was once producing a sum total of five different office chairs. Today, they produce 17, using roughly the same number of people. And all the while, lead times have shrunk from two months to as little as 10 days." "

• 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."

• Circling Back: Clearing up myths about the Deming cycle and Seeing How it Keeps Evolving by Ron Moen, Cliff Norman
  

• 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..."

• Keys to the Effective Use of the PDSA Improvement Cycle by John Hunter
  "The PDSA cycle is a learning cycle based on experiments. When using the PDSA cycle prediction of the results are important... The plan stage may well take 80% (or even more) of the effort on the first turn of the PDSA cycle in a new series. The Do stage may well take 80% of of the time - it usually doesn't take much effort (to just collect a bit of extra data) but it may take time for that data to be ready to collect."

• Standardized Work is a Goal To Work Toward, Not a Tool to Implement by Jeffrey Liker
  Standardized work is foundational to the Toyota Production System, yet remains one of the most misunderstood principles to outsiders. It is crucial to understand the true purpose of this foundational practice. Standardized work in the context of the Toyota Way refers to the most efficient and effective combination of people, material, and equipment to perform the work that is presently possible. “Presently possible” means it is today’s best-known way, which can be improved.

• Evolution of the PDSA Cycle by Ron Moen, Cliff Norman
  "Deming has always given credit to Shewhart for the idea of the cycle, but Deming has fostered the expansion of the idea to all areas for learning and improvement."

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.

• The W. Edwards Deming Institute Blog by John Hunter
  

• W. Edwards Deming Institute by W. Edwards Deming
  Founded by W. Edwards Deming the institute carries forward his philosophy. The site includes information on the institutes annual conferences and offers newsletters online.

• 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, ...

• Institute for Healthcare Improvement
  IHI works to accelerate improvement by building the will for change, cultivating promising concepts for improving patient care, and helping health care systems put those ideas into action. White papers available online on topics such as: Planning for Scale: Going Lean in Health Care, A Guide for Designing Large-Scale Improvement Initiatives, A Framework for Spread: From Local Improvements to System-Wide Change, and Seven Leadership Leverage Points for Organization-Level Improvement in Health Care.

• 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.

• Associates in Process Improvement
  Consulting firm with Provost, Langley, Norman, Moen and Nolan. Authors of the excellent: Improvement Guide. Several very good articles on variation available on the site.

• 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.