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.

• 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).

• 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"

• Emotional Intelligence: by Daniel Goleman
  Sets forth the proposition that emotional intelligence plays a more important role in success than IQ. The book provides insight into the theory of psychology portion of Deming's philosophy.

• 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.

• Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother
  "Toyota Kata gets to the essence of how Toyota manages continuous improvement and human ingenuity, through its improvement kata and coaching kata. Mike Rother explains why typical companies fail to understand the core of lean and make limited progress—and what it takes to make it a real part of your culture." —Jeffrey K. Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way

• Don't Accept Me As I Am: Helping Retarded People to Excel by Reuven Feuerstein, Yaacov Rand, John E. Rynders
  Feuerstein name may be familiar to you due to Myron Tribus' efforts to introduce Feuerstein ideas to the Deming community.

• 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.

• Transforming Health Care Leadership: A Systems Guide to Improve Patient Care, Decrease Costs, and Improve Population Health by Cliff Norman
  "The authors of this book provide the necessary tools for health care leaders to build a learning organization that can make the Triple Aim a reality—better patient care, at lower per-capita cost, while learning to improve population health." — Donald M. Berwick

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box by George E. P. Box
  From early childhood to a celebrated career in academia and industry, acclaimed statistician George E.P. Box offers personal insights and a first-hand account of his professional accomplishments in this insightful memoir. It features thoughts from more than a dozen researchers and practitioners on how Box shaped their careers; previously unpublished photos from Box’s personal collection; and Forewords written by two of Box’s closest colleagues and confidants. An Accidental Statistician is a charming, intimate account of a great intellect’s life that will appeal to math and engineering professionals.

Management Articles

• How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen
  "Doing deals doesn’t yield the deep rewards that come from building up people... Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life's strategy... worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success."

• Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient by John Allspaw
  "for complex systems: there is no root cause. ... Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes. ... In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."

• 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."

• 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.

• Motivation Misfires by Esther Derby
  "Contests, prizes, pep talks, badges, points, canned thank you notes, and recognition events. Most of this comes down to using rewards to motivate people to continue certain behavior. Some of these work for some people, some of the time. But most of them backfire, for most people, most of the time. ... The zeroth step in boosting motivation is to stop doing things that demotivate people."

• 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."

• The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
  "We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about. ... a large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs"

• A Management, Leadership, and Board Road Map to Transforming Care for Patients by John Toussaint
  "This article offers an alternative approach: management by process—an operating system that engages frontline staff in decisions and imposes standards and processes on the act of managing. Organizations that have adopted management by process have seen quality improve and costs decrease because the people closest to the work are expected to identify problems and solve them. Also detailed are the leadership behaviors required for an organization to successfully implement the management-by-process operating system and the board of trustees’ role in supporting the transformation."

• 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."

• Foundations For Transformation: Linking Purpose, People and Process by Mike Stoecklein
  "Nearly all organizations have attempted some type of company-wide improvement effort, and most managers and workers in organizations have experienced attempts to introduce and implement different management approaches. The experience for most people has been a series of programs (flavors of the month1) rather than the pursuit of a philosophy of improvement. We have observed predictable patterns in companies that pursue company-wide improvement from nearly all industries and share them in this paper. The foundations for transformation can be applied to not only business, but also government and education."

• Managing Fear by Gerald Suarez
  Great article on the damage of fear in organizations and what to do to improve the situation.

• William G. Hunter: An Innovator and Catalyst for Quality Improvement by George E. P. Box
  This is the text of a talk given at the Speakers' Dinner at the Sixth Annual William G. Hunter Conference on Quality in Madison, Wisconsin, on June 2, 1993. In it, George Box recalls Bill Hunter's pivotal role in the birth of the quality movement in the c

• Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation by David Sirota, Louis Mischkind, Michael Meltzer
  "To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work.and then satisfy those goals: equity, achievement and camaraderie."

• An Introduction to Deming's Management Ideas by Peter R. Scholtes
  An Introduction to Deming's Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes - webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008.

• 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."

• 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.'"

• 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."

• Systematic review of the Hawthorne effect: New concepts are needed to study research participation effects
  "Nineteen purposively designed studies were included, providing quantitative data on the size of the effect in eight randomized controlled trials, five quasiexperimental studies, and six observational evaluations of reporting on one's behavior by answering questions or being directly observed and being aware of being studied. Although all but one study was undertaken within health sciences, study methods, contexts, and findings were highly heterogeneous. Most studies reported some evidence of an effect, although significant biases are judged likely because of the complexity of the evaluation object. Conclusion Consequences of research participation for behaviors being investigated do exist, although little can be securely known about the conditions under which they operate, their mechanisms of effects, or their magnitudes. New concepts are needed to guide empirical studies."

• 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...

• 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."

• The Equally Important “Respect for People” Principle by Bob Emiliani
  "The 'Respect for People' principle encompasses all key stakeholders: employees, suppliers, customers, investors, and communities. Thus, rather than representing a single dyad, the 'Respect for People' principle is a multilateral expression of the need for balanced, mutually respectful relationships, cooperation, and co-prosperity with these key stakeholders."

• 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."

• 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."

• 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."

• Being Responsive is Critical for Successful Customer Development
  "Customers can be quite forgiving. But what they won’t tolerate is being ignored. Even the feeling or inkling of being ignored can set customers into a rage; and worse, have them looking for alternative solutions to yours. The way to avoid this is simple: Be Responsive."

• 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...

• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's
  "All of that can lead to a better customer experience. A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don't have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he'll walk you over instead of just saying 'aisle five.' Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try."

• 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."

• 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."

• Charlie Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgement
  "Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine. ... you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens. "

• How Whole Foods "Primes" You To Shop
  "Flowers, as everyone knows, are among the freshest, most perishable objects on earth. Which is why fresh flowers are placed right up front--to "prime" us to think of freshness the moment we enter the store. Consider the opposite--what if we entered the store and were greeted with stacks of canned tuna and plastic flowers?"

• 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."

• Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails
  "Small samples can be sufficient to detect large effects. However, small effects require large samples. The probability of replicating a published finding is a function of sample size and effect size. The Replicability Index (R-Index) makes it possible to use information from published results to predict how replicable published results are." ... Five years later, Kahneman’s concerns have been largely confirmed. Major studies in social priming research have failed to replicate and the replicability of results in social psychology is estimated to be only 25%" Daniel Kahneman: "The lesson I have learned, however, is that authors who review a field should be wary of using memorable results of underpowered studies as evidence for their claims."

• 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. "

• 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."

• Managing Fear in the Workplace by Gerald Suarez
  

• 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."

• 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. "

• 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..."

• 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..."

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, ...

• Quantum Shifting
  Vision: People all over the world enjoy meaningful and satisfying work by thinking bigger about themselves, their work and the world.

• 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.

• Personal Kanban
  "Despite our best intentions, life has a way of becoming complicated. People, tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and even recreation all compete for our attention. The human brain however, simply does not respond well to the stress of juggling multiple priorities... here are only two real rules with Personal Kanban: 1. Visualize your work 2. Limit your work-in-progress"

• 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.

• 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."