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.

• 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.

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

• Rework: by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson
  Great book by the founders of 37 signals on how to get to work and avoid the distractions of bad management practices. Take a new look at how to work without the outdated traditions.

• 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).

• 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."

• 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.

• The Lean Startup: by Eric Ries
  Great book that is also very popular in general management circles and software development circles (the software development and startup areas overlap so much today that this is no surprise). The book focuses on applying lean thinking ideas in an entrepreneurial setting. So the book focuses on quick success and customer focus. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or those in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility and quickly. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Management Articles

• A Disruptive Solution for Health Care by Clayton Christensen, Jason Hwang
  "by specifically targeting these customers who have been excluded from the traditional marketplace, disruptive business models can first establish a foothold outside the normal competitive space before moving in to compete against the incumbent firms..."

• In the Long Run with Jeff Bezos by Jeff Bezos, Bradford Cross
  "A key part of the focus that Bezos puts on the long term view is the way it combines with innovation, drive and customer focus."

• A Fun Presentation on a Powerful Software Test Design Approach by Justin Hunter
  "My own consistent experiences and formal studies indicate that pairwise, orthogonal array-based, and combinatorial test design approaches often lead to a doubling of tester productivity (as measured in defects found per tester hour) as compared to the far more prevalent practice in the software testing industry of selecting and documenting test cases by hand."

• Innovation with Joel Barker by Wayne Turmel, Joel Barker
  "Innovation isn't necessarily all great. Unintended consequences are something to be considered- what Joel calls "Cascade Thinking". What are the long-term consequences before you invest. "the answer to the problem is only the beginning of the solution...

• 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."

• 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."

• A Call for Continued Open Standards and Net Neutrality
  by Tim Berners-Lee. "The primary design principle underlying the Web’s usefulness and growth is universality. When you make a link, you can link to anything. That means people must be able to put anything on the Web, no matter what computer they have, software they use or human language they speak and regardless of whether they have a wired or wireless Internet connection. The Web should be usable by people with disabilities. It must work with any form of information, be it a document or a point of data, and information of any quality—from a silly tweet to a scholarly paper. And it should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large."

• 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.'"

• America's dysfunctional patent system is stifling innovation
  "At the heart of the problem – and we should keep this squarely in mind – is a federal machine that, willy-nilly, grants patents that never should have been allowed in the first place. It is a machine created and run by lawyers, for lawyers, and which has absolutely no incentive to reform itself."

• Slow Ideas: Some innovations spread fast. How do you speed the ones that don’t? by Atul Gawande
  "In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spread quickly. Plenty do: think of in-vitro fertilization, genomics, and communications technologies themselves. But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why."

• 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."

• 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..."

• 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

• Presenter and participants actually test software by Justin Hunter
  by Matt Heusser "The first session of the conference was Justin Hunter’s “Let’s Test Together,” which promised to not only introduce a new test design method, but to change the way we (the audience) think about software testing. ... It was a neat session and his passion came through"

• 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)."

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
  

• 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.

• 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.

• Management Wisdom by Clare Crawford Mason, W. Edwards Deming, Robert Mason
  Home of the Deming Library tapes and Better Management for a Changing World (with Ackoff and Suarez).

• 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.

• 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.

• Signal vs. Noise
  Blog on design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture and software development.