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.

• Human Side of Enterprise: 25th Anniversary Printing by Douglas Mc Gregor
  Originally published in 1960. Great book. A classic that is still very worthwhile.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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"

• 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."

• 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."

Management Articles

• The Relentless Contrarian by Peter Drucker
  what's absolutely unforgivable is the financial benefit top management people get for laying off people. There's no excuse for it. No justification. No explanation. This is morally and socially unforgivable, and we'll pay a very nasty price.

• 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."

• 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."

• 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...

• 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."

• 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."

• Bored People Quit by Michael Lopp
  "Boredom shows up quietly and appears to pose no immediate threat. This makes it both easy to address and easy to ignore. ... Let them experiment. Let them obsess. Let them scratch that itch. If there is no project on their plate that you know is engaging them, create time for them to explore whatever they want to obsess about. I absolutely guarantee there is an investigation somehow related to their work that they are dying to tinker with. The business justification for this wild-ass effort is likely not obvious, so I’ll define it: the act of exploration is as valuable as the act of building. Exploration is hard to justify because it’s hard to measure."

• 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."

• 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..."

• Jeff Bezos Interview by Jeff Bezos
  "I think one thing I find very motivating -- and I think this is probably a very common form of motivation or cause of motivation is, I love people counting on me, and so, you know, today it's so easy to be motivated, because we have millions of customers...

• 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."

• 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."

• 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..."

• 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."

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.

• Management and Leadership Quotes by John Hunter
  Quotes on management, business, leadership and many related topics: innovation, problems solving, change, statistics, planning, motivation, etc..

• 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.

• 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, ...

• 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.