Tag: learning organization

Management Books

• 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

• Lean Hospitals: Improving Quality, Patient Safety, and Employee Satisfaction by Mark Graban
  

• Improving Almost Anything: by George E. P. Box
  

• Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions by John Kotter
  Harvard Business School professor Kotter teams up with executive Rathgeber to offer his contribution to the "business fable" genre. Kotter presents his framework for an effective corporate change initiative through the tale of a colony of Antarctic penguins facing danger-inspired, perhaps, by today's real-life global warming crisis. Under the leadership of one particularly astute bird, a small team of penguins with varied personalities and leadership skills implement a thoughtful plan for coaxing the other birds in their colony through a time of necessary but wrenching change.

• Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System by Art Smalley, Durward K. Sobek
  Winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize. The A3 report has proven to be a key tool In Toyota’s successful move toward organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and improvement, especially within its engineering and R&D organizations. The power of the A3 report, however, derives not from the report itself, but rather from the development of the culture and mindset required for the implementation of the A3 system. In other words, A3 reports are not just an end product but are evidence of a powerful set of dynamics that is referred to as A3 Thinking.

• Gemba Walks: by Jim Womack
  This book complies Womack's essays on the practice of lean and adds some additional context to the essays.

• 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

• Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
  The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.

• 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

• 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."

• Teaching Quality Improvement by Quality Improvement in Teaching by Ian Hau
  This paper describes how students and the instructor worked as a team to improve the quality of teaching in a class. The defect rate dropped from 78% to 22% for computer instruction, 56% to 8% for blackboard presentation and 82% to 20% for overhead presentation.

• TPS vs. Lean and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Art Smalley
  "In every piece of TPS literature from Toyota, this stated aim is mixed in with the twin production principles of Just in Time (make and deliver the right part, in the right amount, at the right time), and Jidoka (build in quality at the process), as well as the notion of continuous improvement by standardization and elimination of waste in all operations to improve quality, cost, productivity, lead-time, safety, morale and other metrics as needed. This clear objective has not substantially changed since the first internal TPS training manual was drafted over thirty years ago."

• Nutrifood Indonesia: Manufacturing an Ethical Workplace
  "we reviewed a set of 22 video tapes about the Deming Management method. My daughter, Yul (Julianti Darmawan Swecker), who was working at Nutrifood at the time as corporate secretary and HRD manager, translated and summarized the content of this series and produced leadership training material for our managers."

• Focus on Discovery, Not Decision-Making, Is Key To Success by Steven Spear
  "The challenge is devising a new approach to managing systems so complex that 'thinking our way' to adequate, let alone perfect, designs is impossible. We are now in an age in which management must instead focus on constant discovery and innovation – relentlessly learning better ways to do work and learning that there is better work to do.

• 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."

• Zenjidoka - A Simple Tool for a Complex Problem by Norman Bodek
  "Had the tools of the Toyota Production System been extended from the factory floor worker to every employee who makes contact with the customer, Toyota could have dramatically reduced the resulting financial impact and human tragedy. ... Zenjidoka is a new word meaning "Total Jidoka." Instead of confining Jidoka to the factory floor, Zenjidoka extends Jidoka to every employee who has any contact with the end customer."

• 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."

• Interview of and by Dr. Ackoff and Dr. Deming by Russell L. Ackoff, Clare Crawford-Mason, W. Edwards Deming
  Great stuff. The transcript spells Dr. Ackoff's name wrong (Akoff). They discuss the important of viewing organizations as systems and a fair amount of time on the problems with business school education in the USA. And they touch on a huge number of management topics. Dr. Deming "When one understands who depends on me, then I may take joy in my work." Dr. Ackoff "If there isn't join in work, you won't get productivity, and you won't get quality."

• 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.'"

• 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.

• Deming's14 points are not a menu you can pick and choose from. by David Joyce
  "Everyone should search continually for problems in order to improve every activity in the company, to improve quality and productivity and thus to constantly decrease costs. Finding what’s wrong is not improvement. Plugging leaks is not improvement. Don’t look at outcomes or defects, instead look at what produces the defects."

• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings by Jason Yip
  "It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity. ... Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."

• How Do We Know What We Know? - Deming’s SoPK Part IV by John Hunter
  "If we can break from such beliefs that are not useful in modern organizations, we can improve our decisions. Having a Deming-based theory of knowledge will help us break from those beliefs and it will help us be more thoughtful as we learn to question other management beliefs we hold –many of which simply are not useful –or cause harm. Understanding the theory of knowledge within the context of the Deming’s System for Managing helps us more effectively and consistently learn and improve the processes and systems we work with. "

• 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."

• 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..."

• Eight guidelines for closing the knowing-doing gap by Jason Yip
  "Why before How: philosophy is important. Focus on Why (philosophy, general guidance) before How (detailed practices, behaviours, techniques) ... Action counts more than elegant plans and concepts. Ready, fire, aim. Act even if you haven't had the time to fully plan the action..."

• Lean Leadership Kaizen is Management by Mark Rosenthal
  "First they tried copying the benchmarked system on a small-scale test to deepen their understanding of what they had studied. Trying it on their parts surfaced differences that weren’t obvious at first, and they learned copying definitely wouldn’t work. Key: The reason they tried to copy was to learn more about it. This was a small-scale concept test, not an attempt at wholesale implementation... So, while an individual improvement task might take longer as people learn, in the end there is a multiplier effect as more and more people get better and better at making improvements. Sadly, it is really impossible to assign an ROI to that, so traditional management doesn’t allow for it..."

• 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 Confusion by Art Smalley
  "The important thing to note about Job Breakdown Sheets is that they contain Key Points, and Reasons Why for important steps in the process. Those key points and reasons why have to come from somewhere and that somewhere is usually a work standard which I have outlined above. Work standards don't change very often. Job Breakdown Sheets change a little more often. ...The best leaders were often the ones most adept at pulling specific improvement ideas from their work teams. That of course takes some time and development before it occurs on a regular basis. However it is the grease that lubricates Toyota's improvement process."

• Teaching Smart People How to Learn by Chris Argyris
  Only part of the article is shared openly - the rest is hidden behind a paywall.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Langford for Learning by David P. Langford
  Quality learning achieved through continual improvement of systems which aim to produce the optimum state of personal, social, physical, and intellectual development within each individual. It is a commitment to excellence by each individual and is achieved through teamwork and a process of continual improvement and/or redesign. The site includes worthwhile articles.

• 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."

• Sabu Sense by Lew Rhodes
  Web site of Lew Rhodes with numerous articles in addition to blog posts. Lew has a long history in education so much of the material focuses in that area.

• 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.