5 Lean Books To Read In 2010
I’ve been glancing through old 2009 issues of The Chartered Quality Institutes magazine and have compiled a list of five books which I want to read in 2010; all were mentioned in articles, reviewed or recommended by readers.
So, here’s my 2010 reading list:
Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way
Description
To become the Toyota of your industry, it’s vital to emulate not only the company’s process, but to learn from its company-wide culture
Toyota has changed the economic and business landscape, and in The Toyota Way, Jeffrey K. Liker explained that this success was the result of consistently applying four key management principles for organizational excellence-Philosophy, People, Problem Solving, and Process. In Toyota Talent, authors Liker and Meier explained how people are trained to perform their jobs at exceptional levels. Now Liker and coauthor Mike Hoseus delve even deeper to explore how Toyota creates and maintains a culture that sustains consistent growth, innovation, profitability, and mutual prosperity between the company and its employees.
Liker skillfully weaves 25 years of experience studying Toyota with the insider Toyota experience of Mike Hoseus and The Center for Quality People and Organizations, a group founded to teach the Toyota Way to outside organizations and support training at Toyota. Toyota Culture helps your company to change their culture so that individuals at all levels can achieve exceptional results.
Toyota’s proven system for investing in people
“A must-read for plant managers and lean thinkers alike. The book delves deep into the business practices that took Toyota Motor Corp. from its meager beginnings in 1930 to, as Liker puts it, ‘the world’s best manufacturer’…[it] explores how Toyota selects, develops, and motivates its people to drive excellence throughout the production process.”–Industry Week magazine
The Toyota company-wide culture is the key ingredient in its success as the global leader in operational excellence. To help your company become the Toyota of your industry, leading Toyota authorities Jeffrey Liker and Michael Hoseus give you the inside scoop on creating and maintaining a people-centric culture that sustains consistent growth, innovation, profitability, and excellence. Drawing upon their unprecedented access to Toyota executives, managers, and factories across the globe, the authors show how you can build a culture of continuous improvement by:
- Attracting, developing, and engaging exceptional people
- Encouraging problem solving at all levels of your organization
- Making management accountable to employees
- Inspiring your people to be committed to the company, family, and community
- Turning your HR department into the arbitrators of fair and consistent daily practices
- Using a top-down and bottom-up planning process to involve everyone in achieving breakthrough goals
Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet
Review
‘Tim Jackson’s book simply resets the agenda for Western society.’ –Bernie Bulkin, former Chief Scientist of BP
‘Provokes official thought on the unthinkable. No small accomplishment! I hope this gets the serious attention it deserves.’ –Professor Herman Daly, author of Steady-State Economics and recipient of the Honorary Right Livelihood Award (Sweden’s alternative to the Nobel Prize)
Product Description
Is more economic growth the solution? Will it deliver prosperity and well-being for a global population projected to reach nine billion? In this explosive book, Tim Jackson – a top sustainability adviser to the UK government – makes a compelling case against continued economic growth in developed nations. No one denies that development is essential for poorer nations. But in the advanced economies there is mounting evidence that ever-increasing consumption adds little to human happiness and may even impede it. More urgently, it is now clear that the ecosystems that sustain our economies are collapsing under the impacts of rising consumption. Unless we can radically lower the environmental impact of economic activity – and there is no evidence to suggest that we can – we will have to devise a path to prosperity that does not rely on continued growth. Economic heresy? Or an opportunity to improve the sources of well-being, creativity and lasting prosperity that lie outside the realm of the market? Tim Jackson provides a credible vision of how human society can flourish – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. Fulfilling this vision is simply the most urgent task of our times. The book is a substantially revised and updated version of Jackson’s controversial study for the Sustainable Development Commission, an advisory body to the UK Government.
Profit Beyond Measure
Description
Waste has plagued almost every industrial-age firm for the past century. In this powerfully argued alternative to conventional cost management thinking, experts H. Thomas Johnson and Anders Bröms assert that any company can avoid the waste that is generated through excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses from market instability in the long run. To gain more secure levels of profitability, management must simply change how it thinks about work and how it organizes work.
Profit Beyond Measure details how two extremely profitable manufacturers, Toyota and the Swedish truck maker Scania, have rejected the traditional mechanistic mindset of managing by results that generates waste. Johnson and Bröms explain how Toyota and Scania achieve their legendary cost advantage through a revolutionary concept they call managing by means (MBM). Instead of being driven to meet preconceived accounting targets, the production systems of Toyota and Scania are governed by the three precepts that guide all living systems: self-organization, interdependence, and diversity.
Amid a wealth of new insights into Toyota’s vaunted system, Johnson and Bröms introduce the tools of MBM to show how design, production, and profitability analysis are done to customer order. They demonstrate that by following the principles that emulate life systems, even a lean and profitable company can organize work to greatly lessen its long-term earnings instability and sharply reduce its short-run operating costs.
Scania has achieved sixty-five years of financial stability and longevity in the face of fierce competition. Toyota has amassed a market value since 1988 that has rivaled — or sometimes surpassed — the American “Big Three” automakers combined. The principles that Johnson and Bröms set forth in Profit Beyond Measure can guarantee the same richer, longer life to any company that applies them.
Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement
Review
“Pitfalls and opportunities are explained in straightforward terms that help managers to steer process improvement efforts towards sustained advantage. Schonberger reveals how to refocus lean and Six Sigma processes on what he calls the ?golden goals?: better quality, quicker response, greater flexibility and higher value.” (Worksmanagement.co.uk, August 2008)”This book makes the case that “lean won?t work without quality“, and to that end the author focuses on the companies that have achieved “the world?s longest, steepest rates of improvement in leanness” companies like Dell, Wall–Mart. The book poses a curious semantical analysis of the term supply chain management suggesting that the emphasis on the word supply implies that it is the customers? job to manage and improve relations with their suppliers.” (IndustryWeek.com, July 2008)
Description
Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement reveals how to refocus lean/six sigma processes on what author Richard Schonberger—world–renowned process improvement pioneer—calls “the Golden Goals”: better quality, quicker response, greater flexibility, and higher value. This manual shows you how it can be done, employing success stories of over 100 companies including Apple, Illinois Tool Works, Dell, Inc., and Wal–Mart, all of which have established themselves as the new, global “Kings of Lean,” surpassing even Toyota in long–term improvement.
Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results
A leading expert on Toyota provides the very first look at the company’s people-management routines
Based on six years of research, Toyota Kata brings to light, for the first time, the auto company’s secrets to managing employees. It reveals the two main routines of thinking and acting (called kata) that Toyota instills in its people, which in turn generate continuous improvement, adaptation, and remarkable results.
Inside, Mike Rother provides the insights readers need to model their management system after that of Toyota. Anyone seeking better ways to lead, manage, and develop people will find all they need in Toyota Kata.
Lead, Manage, and Develop Your People–the Toyota Way!
“By uncovering exactly what makes Toyota the standard bearer in a way that is accessible to every management level, in every industry, Rother has given the business world a true gem–Toyota Kata is a must read!”
Keith Allman, President, Delta Faucet Company
“Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata is a rare and exciting event–a book that casts entirely new light on a much-heralded set of management practices, giving those practices new significance and power.”
from the Foreword by H. Thomas Johnson, author of Profit Beyond Measure
“In Toyota Kata, Rother has put his finger on the heart of the coaching process at Toyota. He has distilled the PDCA process to its simplest and most essential core. Much of Toyota’s success is rooted in these subtle yet powerful behaviors Mike so clearly describes. Kata provides a level of clear insight into the key principles underlying Toyota culture in a way that can be easily understood and applied. Essential reading for any company committed to lasting culture change.”
Bill Costantino, W3 Group, Former Group Leader TMMK (Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc.)
What’s on your 2010 reading list and why? Leave a comment below.
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By learnsigma on January 18th, 2010 at 9:01 am
New Blog Post: 5 Lean #Books To Read In 2010 http://goo.gl/fb/qwb5 #feature #quality #sustainability
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By LeanThings on January 26th, 2010 at 11:00 am
5 Lean Books To Read In 2010 :: learnsigma http://ow.ly/10v0f #lean
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