Quality: Business & Leadership: Recommended Reading

Pink argues that the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today's world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unsuitable and woefully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process.

Written by two experts who have dedicated their careers to quality improvement, Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipesseparates itself from other improvement books by looking at why most companies rarely achieve anything more than an average level of improvement maturity. They identify five critical ingredients required for successful improvement.

Expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, this bestselling business classic by two internationally renowned management analysts describes a business system for the twenty-first century that supersedes the mass production system of Ford, the financial control system of Sloan, and the strategic system of Welch and GE. It is based on the Toyota (lean) model, which combines operational excellence with value-based strategies to produce steady growth through a wide range of economic conditions.

This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower.

In plain language and with detailed drawings, this workbook explains everything you will need to know to create accurate current-state and future- state maps for each of your product families and then to turn the current state into the future state rapidly and sustainably.

The Innovator's Dilemma eloquently demonstrates a shattering paradox: that the best of conventional good business practices can ultimately weaken a great firm. There is a certain type of technological innovation that Christensen labels disruptive technology, which mainstream customers initially reject. Following these customers causes well-managed firms to allow strategic innovations to languish. The solution? Create a subsidiary entirely focused on the emerging market, one that is free to be visionary while courting an unorthodox customer base and staying poised to catch the next great wave of industry growth.

The authors reveal how to execute an innovation initiative. Regardless of the type of initiative, the crux of the challenge is that business organizations are not designed for innovation; they are designed for ongoing operations. And there are deep and fundamental conflicts between the two.

When John Shook worked at Toyota he noticed that the senior experts on the Toyota Production System often drew simple maps when on the shop floor. These maps showed the current physical flow of a product family and the information flow for that product family as they wound through a complex facility making many products.

The best leaders not only lead well but also reflect on their leadership long enough and thoughtfully enough to articulate the philosophies that cause them to do so. Whether serving in the marketplace or in ministry, as executives or rank-and-file employees, as salaried staff or volunteer servants, good leaders can pinpoint the rationale for their actions and decisions with the ease of reciting their home address.

Develops a useful theory of bureaucratic decision making. The theory will enable analysts to predict at least some aspects of bureau behavior accurately, and to incorporate bureaus into a more generalized theory of social decision making--particularly one relevant to democracies.

Rogers presents the culmination of more than thirty years of research that will set a new standard for analysis and inquiry. The fourth edition is (1) a revision of the theoretical framework and the research evidence supporting this model of diffusion, and (2) a new intellectual venture, in that new concepts and new theoretical viewpoints are introduced.

Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.

Be Our Guest outlines proven Disney principles and processes for helping your organization focus its vision and align its people and infrastructure into a cohesive strategy that delivers on the promise of exceptional customer service.

In this book, they develop a coherent model for how today's executives can identify and accomplish no less than heroic goals in tomorrow's marketplace. Their masterful blueprint addresses how executives can ease the tension between competing today and clearing a path toward leadership in the future.

Based on more than ten years of Bain & Company research and analysis and fresh examples from firms responding to the current downturn, the book outlines what today's executives and managers need to do now to revitalize their core, identify the next wave of profitable growth, and build on it successfully.

Zook outlines an expansion strategy based on putting together combinations of adjacency moves into areas away from, but related to, the core business, such as new product lines or new channels of distribution. These sequences of moves carry less risk than diversification, yet they can create enormous competitive advantage, because they stem directly from what the company already knows and does best.

How to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with CEOs from companies such as De Beers, American Express, and Samsung, it shows readers how to recognize when the core needs reinvention and how to deploy the "hidden assets" that can be the basis for tomorrow's growth.

This work presents a simple thesis: that sucessful companies - the market leaders - excel at delivering one type of value to their chosen customers. Market leaders choose a single value discipline and literally build their organization around it.

These are tough times for business. The old solutions no longer work and the silver bullets of the late 1990s have proven to be hollow. Business-people need a tool kit of new ideas and techniques. That's what the New York Times business bestseller The Agenda delivers. It will forever change the way you think about business.

Provides managers with the right metrics for evaluating important aspects of performance that are not accurately tracked by most companies and government organizations.

Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century--centered on control and efficiency--no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management.

Explains how simple checklists have prompted striking and immediate improvements in surgical and hospital settings, then goes beyond the field of medicine to explore how checklists have improved everything from homeland security to investment banking.

Identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out applicable approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.

Wall Street Journal Bestseller New York Times bestselling author Dan Heath explores how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers. So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of response. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems. Cops chase robbers, doctors treat patients with chronic illnesses, and call-center reps address customer complaints. But many crimes, chronic illnesses, and customer complaints are preventable. So why do our efforts skew so heavily toward reaction rather than prevention? Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream--including "problem blindness," which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out--as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation's culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge--and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas. Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them. How many problems in our lives and in society are we tolerating simply because we've forgotten that we can fix them?

"Drawing on the examples of top performers such as Agatha Christie, Andy Warhol, Barack Obama and Serena Williams, an award-winning psychologist discusses ways to examine their examples and develop the knowledge to develop new ideas"-- Provided by publisher.

Provides managers with the right metrics for evaluating important aspects of performance that are not accurately tracked by most companies and government organizations.

Guides government and nonprofit organizations through the implementation of a performance management system using the Balanced Scorecard. Authors bring a wealth of implementation knowledge and experience to this book, leading to hands-on, practical guidance and tips to that ensure success.

Futuring is the art and science of exploring the future. It offers methods and techniques that can help you understand trends, identify opportunities and avoid dangers. Futuring can help you understand possible future developments, make better decisions, develop worthwhile goals, and find the means to achieve them.

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures.

Coaching is an integral part of people management in many organisations and this book, packed with techniques and examples, exercises, questionnaires and checklists plus a CD with sample audio coaching sessions, will help you put the co-active coaching model into practice.

If you read nothing else on change management, read these 10 articles ( featuring "Leading Change," by John P. Kotter ). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you spearhead change in your organization.

The genius of this book is that it provides the "how" of innovation. It makes innovation practical by getting two groups who are often disconnected--the managers who make decisions and the people on the front lines who create the innovations--onto the same page.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship deals with 'what, when and why'; with policies and decisions; opportunities and risks,structures and strategies; staffing, compensation and rewards. In addition to managers in all types of business, lecturers and students of management and business studies will this a revealing and exciting work. Highly critical in approach, it is nevertheless a practical and illuminating study of a area crucial for today's world.

For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship--from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction--and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time-killing, bureaucratic check-and-balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

the book closely examines and expands on the three keys to empowerment originally presented in Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute-sharing information, creating autonomy through boundaries, and replacing the hierarchy with teams. It clearly outlines the promises and challenges of each stage of the journey, providing managers with thought-provoking questions, clear advice, effective activities, and action tools that will help them create a culture of empowerment.

Coaching high-powered executives requires something extra. Executive coaches must become partners whose emotional investment in business outcomes equals that of their clients. They must have the strength and courage to face an organizational leader in a time of crisis and speak the unvarnished truth. They must be a force to be reckoned with. They have to have backbone and heart.

Six Sigma for Managers "will help managers better understand this concept and how to facilitate the learning, cooperation, skills improvement, and commitment required to make Six Sigma processes a reality in any organization.

Drawing from his experience as founder and CEO at Travelocity.com and from the ten other startups where he's worked, Jones helps readers turn innovation from an academic exercise into an everyday skill.The stories from his career and personal experiences provide well-chosen real world illustrations of how challenging, and ultimately rewarding, it can be to gather a team and establish a culture that is open to change and is committed to innovation as the way to do business.