I have just finished reading these five books in quick succession:

The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century by Stephen Denning

The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education by W Edwards Deming

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production by Taiichi Ohno

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother

The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries

The Denning book has a very interesting take on old and new models of business leadership, with lessons that business can draw from the Agile and Lean development communities.  A good and interesting read but a couple of nits to pick:
1) Scrum receives special attention but without any real analysis of why (or why not)
2) With 70+ recommendations it was easy to lose track of the underlying principles

I would have left Steve Denning there, but he came to LESS 2011 in Stockholm this month, giving an excellent keynote and holding a Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) session on leadership storytelling. I was greatly impressed by both, two of the best sessions of the whole conference. His book The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative is now on my reading wishlist.

I approached Deming and Ohno together as an exercise in going back to original sources – both books must surely be required reading for anyone interested in Lean, even if only as historical reference points.  I was however very struck by the timeliness of the Deming book nearly 20 years after publication and appreciated his warnings against the dangers of “tampering” (a word he uses with some precision) with systems that are prone to random variation.  The Ohno book gave great insight into the origins, influences and historical context of the Toyota Production System, and most especially the exceptional determination and clarity of vision with which Ohno and his mentors applied themselves.  My lasting impressions from this pair of books aren’t so much technical but the feeling that I have encountered some remarkable people.

Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata is my book of the year. I could only read it slowly, finding myself at regular intervals putting the book down to think!  It fills a big gap in Lean literature, explaining the Toyota Production System not as something fixed but as the result of decades of ongoing work, that work being the expression of a uniquely self-sustaining and self-renewing approach to management and leadership.  I wonder if there is an organisation outside the armed services that does this quite so systematically and thoughtfully?  There are lessons we can take away on making transformations endure, but still must be admitted that not many organisations have Toyota’s staying power. That’s a humbling thought.

Taking Ohno and Rother together, it seems clear that Toyota’s approach to improvement relies less on good tools or the employee suggestion box but rather on working towards process goals which would seem well beyond the reach of most other companies.  It is no wonder others struggle to keep up!  Continuous improvement seems such an easy thing, but it is no easy option when you are led with focus and determination, guided by a “True North” to which few would dare aspire.

Last but not least, Eric Ries’s Lean Startup book.  My expectations were driven downwards by the Twitter hype surrounding this book, but I was wrong to be so cautious!  There is real depth here, surprising insights right to the last chapter.  In particular, the “validated learning” concept seems set to be regarded as one of those oh-so-simple but elegant and language-changing ideas. It resolves so many of those frustrating loose ends that get argued about endlessly in Agile and Lean circles, such as the “why” of development work, the meaning of “done” and the appropriateness of metrics.  Now we have new and powerful ways to talk about the values, economics and direction of Lean development that sit very well with Kanban.

So, quite a marathon, but what a great investment!