New Lean Reading List: Shingo Prize Winners Announced

Martin Jul — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:46:00 GMT

The recipient's of this year's Shingo Prize have been announced.

The Research and Professional Publication Prize category is a great reading list for new lean books:

Steven Spear - Chasing the Rabbit. A book on how to catch up with your lean competiors. HBR review here.
Mark Graban - Lean Hospitals. The book by the productive author of leanblog.org.
John Shook - Managing to Learn. Focuses on Toyota's visual A3 management tool.
Professor Peter Hines; Dr. Pauline Found; Gary Griffiths; and Richard Harrison - Staying Lean: Thriving, Not Just Surviving.
Jeffrey K. Liker, Michael Hoseus and the Center for Quality People and Organizations - Toyota Culture. Great author, new book. What's not to like?
Durward K. Sobek II and Art Smalley - Understanding A3 Thinking. Another winning book on Toyota's A3 tool from Productivity Press.

Off to the bookstore!

What's Your Favourite Lean Books?

Martin Jul — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 12:39:00 GMT

People often ask me about recommendations for the must-read books for lean and agile software development.

Here is a list of some of my favourite lean books:

W. Edwards Deming - the grand old man of the field, building on a strict statistical discipline. His book Out of the Crisis is a wonderful treatise on his thinking including his famous "14 Points for Management". This is definitely a must read that will change the way you think about management and quality!
Taiichi Ohno - one of the greatest industrial innovators of the 20th century, the father of the Toyota Production System. After spending his career relentlessly optimizing manufacturing at Toyota he wrote the book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-scale Production that describes his work.
Womack & Jones - Their books are great and it is well worth to read them all to see a lot of the principles and case studies for lean thinking. Also, it is quite interesting to see that software development is now rediscovering some of the things that manufacturing learned much earlier - in the case of Toyota as early as in the 1950s and 1960s. Begin your studies with The Machine That Changed the World, a five-year study of the global auto industry from MIT and go on with the Lean Thinking and Lean Solutions. They give a fascinating perspective on manufacturing and plenty of examples of the lean principles and they applications. These are the books that brought lean to the mainstream.
Mary and Tom Poppendieck - with a background in manufacturing and software they have translated the concepts of lean to software development. They have written two great books and Implementing Lean Software Development and Lean Software Development - an Agile Toolkit. Both books are well worth reading a present a both the principles and lot of cases in a friendly, colloquial manner. Highly recommended!
Matthew May - I really like his approach to elegance and simplicity. May has worked with Toyota and their corporate university and his book The Elegant Solution offers insight into their innovation process - the principles it is built on and the practices that make it work.
Jeffrey Liker - his The Toyota Way is a very good introduction to the application of lean methods at Toyota. This is one of the best lean books I have read. Definitely a favourite!

What is missing? What are your favourites? Don't hesitate - post a comment now :-)

Ative at Work : books

New Lean Reading List: Shingo Prize Winners Announced

What's Your Favourite Lean Books?