100 Best Lean Management Books of All Time (Updated for 2026)

1

The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Eric Ries

5.0

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned profes

Recommended by Sheryl Sandberg, Andrew Chen, Ben Horowitz, and 75 others.

Sheryl Sandberg

COO/Facebook

Provides a great inside look at how the tech industry approaches building products and businesses. [source]

Ben Horowitz

Co-founder/Andreessen Horowitz

Great. [source]

Dustin Moskovitz

Co-founder/Facebook and Asana

At Asana, we've been lucky to benefit from the author's advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business. [source]

2

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement

Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox

4.7

Preview Summary

Written in a fast-paced thriller style, 'The Goal' contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints developed by the author.

Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Danielle Morrill, Kevin Systrom, and 4 others.

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

Encourages companies to identify the biggest constraints in their operations and then structure their organizations to get the most out of those constraints. [source]

Kevin Systrom

About basically manufacturing and supply chain management. It sounds really boring, but I promise you it’s really good. [source]

Chris Goward

Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: … The Goal. [source]

3

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right

Atul Gawande

4.5

Preview Summary

The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist

We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies‚neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer

Recommended by Bill Gates, David Allen, Jack Dorsey, and 10 others.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

A great read. [source]

David Allen

Author

Atul is really talking about how absolutely powerful checklists are, and I think he makes a very creative point: that checklist are not just some static, boring thing. They actually allow you to do excellent work and free up your brain by not having to keep remembering what you need to do when. That then allows your brain to be a lot more creative about whatever it is you’re doing. [source]

Jack Dorsey

Co-Founder/Twitter

recommends this book because he knows that top notch execution is essential to business. [source]

4

The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer

Jeffrey Liker

4.4

"This book will give you an understanding of what has made Toyota successful and some practical ideas that you can use to develop your own approach to business."--Gary Convis, Managing Office of Toyota

Fewer man-hours. Less inventory. The highest quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer. In factories around the globe, Toyota consistently raises the bar for manufacturing, p

5

Lean Thinking

"Daniel T. Jones;James P. Womack"

4.4

In the revised and updated edition of Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, authors James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones provide a thoughtful expansion upon their value-based business system based on the Toyota model. Along the way they update their action plan in light of new research and the increasing globalization of manufacturing, and they revisit some of their key

Recommended by Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

is known as an authoritarian leader. He has established rules, processes and methods that are strictly followed. Jeff’s Reading List is a list of 12 books Bezos expects Amazon employees to read. Many are related to business, but there are other themes as well. Author Brad Stone who wrote the Bezos biography The Everything Store lists those 12 books. The author says the books have shaped Bezos’ leadership style and way of thinking. Lean Thinking is one of those 12 books. [source]

6

The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win

Gene Kim

4.4

Preview Summary

Bill is an IT manager at Parts Unlimited. It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO.

The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department

Recommended by Jeffrey Snover and Louis Nyffenegger.

Jeffrey Snover

Great thread. I know of a number of devops people that haven't read this book. Ya'll should fix that. https://t.co/Yri4JJ0jBZ [source]

Louis Nyffenegger

I don't think I have a specific book that I can call my favourite. Some books have had a big impact on my view of how to build a product/company ("Rework"), some were very enjoyable to read ("The Phoenix Project"), some helped me improve the way I think ("The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out") and some the way I live ("Essentialism") or work ("Deep Work"). [source]

7

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works

Ash Maurya

4.4

We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.

What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.

In

Recommended by Ash Maurya, Garrett Moon, and Ola Olusoga.

Garrett Moon

Running Lean by Ash Maurya: Learn to build products the lean way! [source]

Ola Olusoga

For business, I've read Influence by Robert Cialdini 3 times, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg twice, so if number of times read indicates favor, then those are it. There are a whole bunch of others, like The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, Confession of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, and Running Lean by Ash Maurya, that I've also enjoyed and recommend to people. [source]

8

Machine that Changed the World

James P. Womack

4.4

Today, the industrial world is experiencing the most revolutionary change since Henry Ford's assembly line -- which forever changed the way things are made. Japanese companies are sweeping the world, as Western companies and governments struggle to find ways to emulate them.
The Machine That Changed the World points for the first time to a positive way out of this dilemma. It shows that being defe

Recommended by Robin Sloan and 1 others.

Robin Sloan

I got this book because I am lately into 1980s "business book" time capsules , but in fact it is beautifully written and dizzyingly interesting, even in 2019!! https://t.co/5R8o4MWhpk [source]

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9

Rework

Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

4.4

Preview Summary

Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.

Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the c

Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, Tony Hsieh, and 30 others.

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

Unperturbed by conventional wisdom, the authors start fresh and rewrite the rules of business. Their approach turns out to be as successful as it is counter-intuitive. [source]

Mark Cuban

Entrepreneur / Shark Tank

If given a choice between investing in someone who has read Rework or has an MBA, I'm investing in Rework every time. This is a must read for every entrepreneur. [source]

Tony Hsieh

CEO/Zappos.com

The wisdom in these pages is edgy yet simple, straightforward, and proven. Read this book multiple times to help give you the courage you need to get out there and make something great. [source]

10

The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Clayton M. Christensen

4.4

Preview Summary

The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, renowned author Clayton M. Christensen.

His work is cited by the world’s best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller—now updated with a fresh new package—innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right—yet still lose market leadership. Read th

Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Jobs, and 38 others.

Jeff Bezos

Founder/Amazon

Brad Stone's new book, The Everything Store, describes how Bezos developed this strategy after reading another book called The Innovator's Dilemma by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. [source]

Steve Jobs

Founder/Apple

It's important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls "the innovator's dilemma," where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don't want to be left behind. [source]

Drew Houston

CEO/Dropbox

About how businesses get disrupted, and a lot of those themes are why startups can succeed and thrive even when there are big competitors who you would think would just wipe ’em out. [source]

11

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

Mike Rother

4.4

"How any organization in any industry can progress from old-fashioned management by results to a strikingly different and better way."--James P. Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute. This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain of Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing pe

12

Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions, Third Edition

David Mann

4.4

Winner of a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award

The new edition of this Shingo Prize-winning bestseller provides critical insights and approaches to make any Lean transformation an ongoing success. It shows you how to implement a sustainable, successful transformation by developing a culture that has your stakeholders throughout the organizational chart involved and invested in the o

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13

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

4.3

Preview Summary

Recommended by Nir Eyal, Eric Ries, Ken Norton, and 14 others.

Eric Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

A fantastic, proven formula for moving from idea to prototyping to decision making within five days, based on a process he developed while working at Google and later GV. [source]

Cat Williams-Treloar

Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz "Sprint" - the go-to guide on how to sprint. You may not follow everything to the tee, but it's simple, clean and full of great examples of how to move fast with structure. [source]

Javed Khatri

This book details the "sprint" process used at Google Ventures. We follow a similar process at Kustard to validate business ideas and to solve problems without wasting much time, money and energy. If you want to quickly validate an idea, this is a proven model and a must read. [source]

14

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

Donald G. Reinertsen

4.3

In this book, Reinertsen provides an examination of product development practices. He explains why invisible and unmanaged queues are the underlying root cause of poor product development performance. He shows why these queues form and how they undermine the speed, quality, and efficiency in product development.

15

The Lean Six SIGMA Pocket Toolbook: A Quick Reference Guide to Nearly 100 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed: A Quick Reference Guide to 70 Tools for Improving Quality and Speed

Michael L. George

4.3

Provides the tools for implementing Lean Six Sigma - what they are, how they work, and which to use. This book presents the tools and concepts needed to understand, implement, and leverage Lean Six Sigma. It provides analyses of nearly 100 tools and methodologies - from DMAIC and Pull Systems to Control Charts and Pareto Charts.

16

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

Geoffrey A Moore

4.3

Preview Summary

The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets--now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing

In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle--which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards--there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the ea

Recommended by Andrew Chen, Drew Houston, Ev Williams, and 28 others.

Drew Houston

CEO/Dropbox

It’s about how do technology products make their way from early adopters t the mainstream. [source]

Ron Conway

Bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. [source]

Seth Godin

Author, Marketer, Entrepreneur

This is a key component in my Purple Cow thinking, but with a twist. I'm not as worried about the chasm as I am about the desire of marketers to go for the big middle. [source]

17

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz

4.3

Whether you’re a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry or an intrapreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest challenge is creating a product people actually want. Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction.

This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word. Pa

Recommended by Ash Maurya, Marty Cagan, Ola Olusoga, and 4 others.

Ola Olusoga

Like Charlie Munger once said: “I’ve long believed that a certain system - which almost any intelligent person can learn - works way better than the systems most people use to understand the world. What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And, with that system, things gradually fit together in a way that enhances cognition. Just as multiple factors shape every system, multiple mental models from a variety of disciplines are necessary to understand that system". You can read this book to start building a "latticework of mental models in your head". [source]

18

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

Jeff Sutherland

4.3

Preview Summary

19

The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback

Dan Olsen

4.3

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love"The Lean Product Playbook" is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, ste

Recommended by Nir Eyal, Ken Norton, Dan Olsen, and 2 others.

Julia Enthoven

For people interested in designing or building software products: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen. Both books have informed my product sense and helped me make decisions about great UX. [source]

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20

This Is Lean: Resolving the Efficiency Paradox

Niklas-Modig

4.3

Lean is the most widespread management philosophy of our time and is currently present in every industry, yet the concept is still vaguely defined and widely misunderstood. This is Lean - Resolving the efficiency paradox was launched in October 2011 and is currently the best-selling management book in Sweden, with 37,000 copies sold in one year. By using clear, concise language and insightful exam

21

The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development

Liker

4.3

About the Book: The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership Despite the fact that companies worldwide have adopted Lean production, none has sustained the same levels of excellence as Toyota. Why? Leadership. In The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, Jeffrey Liker and Gary L. Convis, a former Executive Vice President at Toyota, help executives and senior managers get employees to refocus their efforts-from simp

Recommended by Yaro Starak.

Yaro Starak

One of the books I got a lot out of and I haven’t mentioned yet is called “The Toyota Way” which is a book that essentially looks at the Toyota car manufacturing process and why it was so revolutionary, talking about some concepts like kaizen and theory of constraints that came out of that process that Toyota developed and the book about it will give you such an insight into manufacturing, but also just general productivity, like kaizen became a concept that was almost as important as the 80-20 rule to me with my own business but with my own life as well. By the way, kaizen means, it’s like a philosophy of continuous improvement that the Japanese follow or, at least Toyota certainly follows in their business with the car manufacturing. So, that’s something that I think can make a difference perhaps to any entrepreneur but certainly if you’re looking at something to do with like an assembly line, if that’s your business plan, if it included an assembly line then you’ve gotta get yourself “The Toyota Way” book because that’s gonna be so relevant to what you’re doing and will probably give you a head start instead of just trying to figure it out by yourself. So that’s another recommendation. [source]

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22

Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale

Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly

4.3

How well does your organization respond to changing market conditions, customer needs, and emerging technologies when building software-based products? This practical guide presents Lean and Agile principles and patterns to help you move fast at scale—and demonstrates why and how to apply these methodologies throughout your organization, rather than with just one department or team.

Through case st

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23

Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

David J. Anderson

4.3

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24

Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams

Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden

4.3

Lean UX has become the preferred approach to interaction design, tailor-made for today's agile teams. In the second edition of this award winning book, leading advocates Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden expand on the valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques covered in the first edition to share how product teams can easily incorporate design, experimentation, iteration, and continuous lear

Recommended by Andy Budd and Laura Klein.

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25

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

Mary Poppendieck / Tom Poppendieck Poppendieck / Poppendieck

4.3

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

Adapting agile practices to your development organization
Uncovering and eradicating waste throughout the software development lifecycle Practical techniques for every development manager, project manager, and technical leader Lean software development: applying agile principles to your organization

In Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck id

26

Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life

Jim Benson, Tonianne DeMaria Barry

4.3

Preview Summary

Machines need to be productive. People need to be effective.Productivity books focus on doing more, Jim and Tonianne want you to focus on doing better. Personal Kanban is about choosing the right work at the right time. Recognizing why we do the things we do. Understanding the impact of our actions. Creating value - not just product. For ourselves, our families, our friends, our co-workers. For ou

27

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

John Doerr

4.3

Preview Summary

Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth--and how it can help any organization thrive.

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin h

Recommended by Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman, Walter Isaacson, and 6 others.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

John explains how OKRs Objectives and Key Results work and shows how you can apply them in all sorts of situations. I’d recommend John’s book for anyone interested in becoming a better manager (and I’d say that even if I hadn’t been interviewed for a super-nice chapter about the Gates Foundation). [source]

Reid Hoffman

CEO/LinkedIn

Whether you're a seasoned CEO or a first-time entrepreneur, you'll find valuable lessons, tools, and inspiration in the pages of Measure What Matters. I'm glad John invested the time to share these ideas with the world. [source]

Walter Isaacson

Author

In this indispensable book, the most important venture capitalist of our era reveals a key to business innovation and success. This crisp and colorful book combines fascinating case studies with insightful personal stories to show how OKRs can add magic to organizations of any size. [source]

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28

Learning to See Version 1.3

Mike Rother, John Shook, Jim Womack, Dan Jones

4.3

Much more important, these simple maps - often drawn on scrap paper - showed where steps could be eliminated, flows smoothed, and pull systems introduced in order to create a truly lean value stream for each product family.In 1998 John teamed with Mike Rother of the University of Michigan to write down Toyota's mapping methodology for the first time in "Learning to See." This simple tool makes it

29

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers

Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

4.2

Preview Summary

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 -Business Model Canvas- practitione

Recommended by Nir Eyal, Steve Blank, Alexandra Stroe, and 3 others.

Alexandra Stroe

I'd recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and Zero to One by Peter Thiel when they are in the starting phase of a business that needs to validate its business model. [source]

Ashley Hathaway

I could probably name a dozen books here, but I’ll point out The Business Model Generation and Value Prop Design from Strategyzer. I steal from these constantly and are engrained in my work process. These books put into practice really taught me how to think. As soon as I saw that everything should have a foundation of empathy, what good user-testing looks like, how to test and iterate it changed everything. After that any problem could be solved. It wasn’t solving one big monolithic problem. It was going through a process. [source]

Kaci Lambe Kai

This was a great book, because it opened up the idea of what a business model is supposed to be vs what it can be. It doesn't have to be a stuffy, boring document. [source]

30

Toyota Production System: Beyond large-scale production

Taiichi Ohno

4.2

In this classic text, Taiichi Ohno--inventor of the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing--shares the genius that sets him apart as one of the most disciplined and creative thinkers of our time. Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota's attempts at Lean production, Ohno's book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor. A historical and phil

Recommended by Grey Baker.

Grey Baker

Perhaps the only business book I’ve read and truly loved is Taiichi Ohno’s “The Toyota Production System”. It’s referenced a lot as the origin of the “Lean” movement, but it’s a much more enjoyable read than that makes it sound. Rather than management guru speak, it’s a wonderful book about the hard-won lessons Taiichi Ohno learned on the factory floor at Toyota. It won’t teach you what kanban means in modern management, but learning about Ohno’s desire to build an information nervous system for Toyota’s plants is so much more interesting! [source]

31

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Chip Heath and Dan Heath

4.2

Preview Summary

Why is change so difficult and frightening? How do you create change when you have few resources and no title or authority to back you up? Chip and Dan Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick, are back with a ground-breaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives — how to change things when change is hard.

In their follow-up book to the cr

Recommended by Africa Mentor, Richard H Thaler, Satya Patel, and 2 others.

Africa Mentor

6 fine summer reads | London Business School London Business School Review A good book is the best travel companion – wherever you are. By the pool or on your commute, be transported with these titles chos... https://t.co/Wo9NYOrwqG via @theafricamentor #entrepreneur #africabiz [source]

Tudor Mihailescu

First thing first, finance people need to be decent communicators, ideally awesome communicators. There is an art in building a case or in delivering a presentation and we need to treat this step as seriously as we have treated the other steps. I do believe this is a top priority for an aspiring or practicing CFO - There are plenty of books on this topic, I would recommend the works of Chip and Dan Health like Switch and Made to Stick [source]

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32

Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash

Mary Poppendieck

4.2

33

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love

Marty Cagan

4.2

Preview Summary

The basic premise of Inspired is that the best tech companies create products in a manner very different from how most companies create products. The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the

Recommended by Ken Norton and Marty Cagan.

34

The Toyota Way Fieldbook

JeffreyLiker and David Meier

4.2

The Toyota Way Fieldbook is a companion to the international bestseller The Toyota Way. The Toyota Way Fieldbook builds on the philosophical aspects of Toyota's operating systems by detailing the concepts and providing practical examples for application that leaders need to bring Toyota's success-proven practices to life in any organization. The Toyota Way Fieldbook will help other companies learn

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35

Lean from the Trenches

Henrik Kniberg

4.2

Lean from the Trenches is all about actual practice.

Find out how the Swedish police combined XP, Scrum, and Kanban in a 60-person project. From start to finish, you'll see how to deliver a successful product using Lean principles.

We start with an organization in desperate need of a new way of doing things and finish with a group of sixty, all working in sync to develop a scalable, complex system

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36

2 Second Lean (How to Grow People and Build a Fun Lean Culture at Work & at Home, 3rd Edition)

Paul A. Akers

4.2

2 Second Lean will flip your world right-side up. It’s a practical way to improve your life every day by making a simple 2 second improvement. Join author, business expert, radio show host, and international speaker, Paul A. Akers, as he takes you on a LEAN journey that will transform every aspect your life... from your home to the office.

“Ten years ago I began my Lean journey. I had never even h

37

How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business

Douglas W. Hubbard

4.2

Preview Summary

Praise for How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

"I love this book. Douglas Hubbard helps us create a path to know the answer to almost any question in business, in science, or in life . . . Hubbard helps us by showing us that when we seek metrics to solve problems, we are really trying to know something better than we know it now. How to Measure Anything provides j

Recommended by Julia Galef and Nick Ganju.

Julia Galef

Has some good advice on how to improve your ability to make accurate predictions. [source]

Nick Ganju

About being outcome-based and getting these measurable outcomes. [source]

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38

Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are Not the Point

Mary Poppendieck, Tom Poppendieck

4.2

Building on their breakthrough bestsellers Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck's latest book shows software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organization--and make it stick. They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects

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39

Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management

Taiichi Ohno

4.2

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40

The Gold Mine: A Novel of Lean Turnaround

Freddy Balle, Michael Balle

4.2

41

Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense Approach to a Continuous Improvement Strategy, Second Edition

Masaaki Imai

4.2

Publisher's Note: Products purchased from Third Party sellers are not guaranteed by the publisher for quality, authenticity, or access to any online entitlements included with the product.

The definitive, fully up-to-date guide to continuous improvement in the workplace"An updated version of a classic book that shares a wealth of new healthcare examples and case studies from around the world. The m

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42

Managing to Learn

John Shook, Jim Womack

4.2

Managing to Learn by Toyota veteran John Shook, reveals the thinking underlying the vital A3 management process at the heart of lean management and lean leadership. Constructed as a dialogue between a manager and his boss, the book explains how A3 thinking helps managers and executives identify, frame, and then act on problems and challenges. Shook calls this approach, which is captured in the sim

Recommended by Daniel Buttner.

Daniel Buttner

One of the books, Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement and Lead, contained a story of a Japanese supervisor / mentor and how he was guiding his junior colleague in his thought process to solve a complex problem without ever dictating his actions. The story was told from the student and the mentor’s perspective simultaneously - so you could perceive the story from both angles. During that period, I learned a lot about the importance of determining a root cause to a problem before jumping to a conclusion. [source]

43

Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System

Durward K. Sobek II

4.2

Winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize.

Notably flexible and brief, the A3 report has proven to be a key tool In Toyota's successful move toward organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and improvement, especially within its engineering and R&D organizations. The power of the A3 report, however, derives not from the report itself, but rather from the development of the

44

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

Rob Fitzpatrick

4.2

Preview Summary

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fa

Recommended by Chandini Jain, Mikhail Dubov, and Roxana Bitoleanu.

Chandini Jain

Very recently, I read The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. The book talks about how to design user interviews to make sure you're not asking users/customers leading questions and get unbiased feedback. [source]

Mikhail Dubov

One of the five books recommends to young people interested in his career path. [source]

Roxana Bitoleanu

I would definitely start my list with The Mom Test because there is no resource on how to ask questions without being too eager or too revealing. I think this skill should be trained, be it an entrepreneur or not. [source]

45

UX for Lean Startups

Laura Klein

4.2

Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product t

Recommended by Dan Olsen, Laura Klein, Steve Krug, and 1 others.

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46

Out of the Crisis

W. Edwards Deming

4.2

Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management.

"Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment."

According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of ma

47

Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Simple Science of Building the Ultimate Male Body

Michael Matthews

4.2

Preview Summary

MICHAEL MATTHEWS' #1 BESTSELLING NATURAL BODYBUILDING BOOK WITH OVER 400,000 COPIES SOLD. If you want to build muscle, lose fat, and look great as quickly as possible without steroids, good genetics, or wasting ridiculous amounts of time in the gym and money on supplements ... regardless of your age ... then you want to read this book.

48

The Lean Turnaround: How Business Leaders Use Lean Principles to Create Value and Transform Their Company

Art Byrne

4.2

THE C-LEVEL GUIDE TO SUCCEEDING WITH LEAN "With 30 years of accumulated experience, Art Byrne is one of the rare few people who can speak with authority about the pitfalls of fi nancial measurement systems, the importance of respect for people, the power of Lean in the marketplace, and the leverage from organizing people around value streams. When he writes 'Go to the Gemba and Run Your Kaizen, '

49

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations

Nicole Forsgren PhD

4.2

Does technology actually matter? And how can we apply technology to drive business value? For years, we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter--that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance

Recommended by Kirk Borne.

Kirk Borne

Fantastic accomplishment! Congratulations @nicolefv on your outstanding #DevOps book ... I love that: “The Science of Lean” ... that works also for #DataOps and Lean Analytics. https://t.co/i9gPhKL0dt https://t.co/DNJpuJtER0 [source]

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50

The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win

Steve Blank

4.2

The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than

Recommended by Andrew Chen, Ron Conway, Azeem Azhar, and 5 others.

Ryan Hoover

Too much (good) info but thankfully there's a summary in the Appendix. [source]

Antonio Eram

This book was recommended by Antonio when asked for titles he would recommend to young people interested in his career path. [source]

Craig Pearce

If you are reading to learn skills that can be implemented in your startup, I’d recommend The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful by Eric Reis and actually avoid its predecessor The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank until later in your career. [source]

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51

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits, Eric Ries

4.1

Leverage the framework of visionaries to innovate, disrupt, and ultimately succeed as an entrepreneurThe Lean Entrepreneur, Second Edition banishes the "Myth of the Visionary" and shows you how you can implement proven, actionable techniques to create products and disrupt existing markets on your way to entrepreneurial success. The follow-up to the New York Times bestseller, this great guide combi

Recommended by Ash Maurya and Brant Cooper.

52

The Lean Manager

Michael Balle

4.1

Lean is the most important business model for competitive success today. Yet companies still struggle to sustain enduring and deep-rooted business success from their lean implementation efforts. The most important problem for these companies is becoming lean: how can they advance beyond realizing isolated gains from deploying lean tools, to fundamentally changing how they operate, think, and learn

53

Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together

James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones

4.1

In this landmark new book, James Womack and Daniel Jones deconstruct this broken producer-consumer model and show businesses how to repair it.

A massive disconnect exists between consumers and providers today. Consumers have a greater selection of higher quality goods to choose from and can obtain these items from a growing number of sources. Computers, cars, and even big-box retail sites promise t

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54

Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work and Align Leadership for Organizational Transformation

Karen Martin

4.1

The first of its kind—a Value Stream Mapping book written for those in service and office environments who need to streamline operations

Value Stream Mapping is a practical, how-to guide that helps decision-makers improve value stream efficiency in virtually any setting, including construction, energy, financial service, government, healthcare, R&D, retail, and technology. It gives you the tools

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55

The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions

Mary Poppendieck / Tom Poppendieck Poppendieck / Poppendieck

4.1

What company doesn't want energized workers, delighted customers, genuine efficiency, and breakthrough innovation? The Lean Mindset shows how lean companies really work-and how a lean mindset is the key to creating stunning products and delivering amazing services. Through cutting-edge research and case studies from leading organizations, including Spotify, Ericsson, Intuit, GE Healthcare, Pixar

56

Everything I know about LEAN I learned in first grade

Robert O. Martichenko

4.1

57

The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

Steve Blank, Bob Dorf

4.1

Now a decade after the Four Steps to the Epiphany
sparked the Lean Startup revolution, comes its sequel…
The Startup Owner's Manual

The Manual incorporates 10 years of learning and best practices
that have swept the startup world. It:

Incorporates the "Business Model Canvas" as the organizing principle for
startup hypotheses
Provides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus
physical p

Pascal Dennis

4.1

Winner of a Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award

Lean Production Simplified, Second Edition is a plain language guide to the lean production system written for the practitioner by a practitioner. It delivers a comprehensive insider's view of lean manufacturing. The author helps the reader to grasp the system as a whole and the factors that animate it by organizing the book around an i

70

Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy

Cindy Alvarez

4.1

How do you develop products that people will actually use and buy? This practical guide shows you how to validate product and company ideas through customer development research--before you waste months and millions on a product or service that no one needs or wants.

With a combination of open-ended interviewing and fast and flexible research techniques, you'll learn how your prospective customers

Recommended by Thomas Graziani.

Thomas Graziani

I am currently reading two business books: Radical Candor by Kim Scott which I expect can help me build better relationships with my colleagues, and Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez which helps me have more open conversations with clients and better define our product roadmap. [source]

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71

The Toyota Way to Service Excellence: Lean Transformation in Service Organizations

LIKER

4.1

The world's bestselling Lean expert shows service-based organizations how to go Lean, gain value, and get results--The Toyota Way.

A must-read for service professionals of every level, this essential book takes the proven Lean principles of the bestselling Toyota Way series and applies them directly to the industries where quality of service is crucial for success. Jeff Liker and Karyn Ross show yo

72

Managing The Design Factory: A Product Developer's Toolkit

Donald G. Reinertsen

4.1

73

Lean for Dummies

Natalie J. Sayer

4.0

Take charge and engage your enterprise in a Lean transformationHave you thought about using Lean in your business or organization, but are not really sure how to implement it? Or perhaps you're already using Lean, but you need to get up to speed. "Lean For Dummies" shows you how to do more with less and create an enterprise that embraces change. In plain-English, this friendly guide explores the g

74

The Complete Lean Enterprise: Value Stream Mapping for Administrative and Office Processes

Beau Keyte, Drew A. Locher

4.0

"Winner of the 2005 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing Research" Most lean initiatives conducted by manufacturers are focused mostly on shop-floor activities -- mapping the value stream of raw material to the shop-floor customer. Much of the untapped potential for productivity improvements lies, however, in non-production areas -- where the value stream is administrative (i.e., "order to

75

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & flow

Dominica Degrandis

4.0

In this timely book by Information Technology time management expert Dominica DeGrandis, the real crime of the century is revealed--time theft, one of the most costly factors impacting enterprises in their day-to-day operations. In three parts, DeGrandis reveals the five primary causes (a.k.a. the five thieves of time) of value stream delays, the simple yet highly effective solutions that make wor

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76

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise

Eric Ries

4.0

Entrepreneur and bestselling author of The Lean Startup Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses ranging from established companies to early-stage startups to grow revenues, drive innovation, and emerge as truly modern organizations poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the 21st century.

In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of

Recommended by Reid Hoffman, Aaron Levie, Arianna Huffington, and 5 others.

Reid Hoffman

CEO/LinkedIn

Continuous innovation is the key to long-term impact and success. Eric shows how organizations of all kinds—not just startups—can be built to learn and adapt. In the pivot-or-perish networked world of twenty-first-century business, this is mission critical reading. [source]

Aaron Levie

Co-founder/Box

The Startup Way teaches companies of all sizes how to effectively incubate and maintain an entrepreneurial culture through growth by allowing employees to find their inner entrepreneur. A must read, especially, by all leaders burdened by legacy organizational baggage and processes. [source]

Arianna Huffington

Founder/The Huffington Post

In The Startup Way, Eric Ries uses his years of work with companies like GE and Toyota to show us what the company of the future will look like. If you want to know how companies can become more agile, more innovative, and more resilient in the face of today’s relentless pace of change, this is the book for you. [source]

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77

The Birth of Lean

Koichi Shimokawa, Takahiro Fujimoto, et al.

4.0

There are a lot of books that describe the Toyota Production System, but most do so in a way that implies that there was a master plan to create a company-wide improvement system. But as the pioneers in The Birth of Lean explain, there was no master plan—TPS came about through experimentation, trial and error, and an evolution of ideas that shaped Toyota’s structure and management system.

This is a

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78

Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth

Ash Maurya

4.0

A hands-on guide to the metrics that matter most to young tech startups.

In the early stages of a tech startup's life, it's hard to decipher the meaningful
metrics from the distractions. How do you know if your product is working? Is it
the number of new signups? Average amount of time spent on the site? Revenue,
even if you don't have a revenue model yet?

In Scaling Lean, serial entrepreneur and autho

Recommended by Eris Ries, Ash Maurya, and Dan Olsen.

Eris Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

Follow up to his book Running Lean, that shows how to successfully make the leap from startup to sustainable business. [source]

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79

Hiroyuki Hirano

4.0

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85

Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability: An Introduction

Daniel S. Vacanti

4.0

Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability is a comprehensive guide on how to use flow metrics and analytics to get the predictability your customers crave.

“When will it be done?”

That is probably the first question your customers ask you once you start working on something for them. Think about how many times you have been asked that question. How many times have you ever actually been right?

We c

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86

Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

Chet Richards

4.0

Certain to Win [Sun Tzu's prognosis for generals who follow his advice] develops the strategy of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd for the world of business.

The success of Robert Coram's monumental biography, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, rekindled interest in this obscure pilot and documented his influence on military matters ranging from his early work on fighter t

Jim Womack and Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc

4.0

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95

Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility

Klaus Leopold

4.0

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96

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits

4.0

"This is a must read for all startups and stakeholders."
- Steve Blank, author of The 4 Steps to the Epiphany, creator of Customer Development methodology

"The Entrepreneur's Guide is an easy read. It is written in a conversational tone, doesn't take itself too seriously, and avoids extraneous fluff."

- Eric Ries, Author & Creator of the Lean Startup methodology

"Get the CustDev book to dive deep in

97

Velocity: Combining Lean, Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints to Achieve Breakthrough Performance - A Business Novel

Dee Jacob, Suzan Bergland, et al

4.0

Millions of readers remember The Goal, the landmark business novel that sets forth by way of story the essential principles of Eliyahu Goldratt's innovative methods of production. Now, from the AGI-Goldratt Institute and Jeff Cox, the same creative writer who co-authored The Goal, comes VELOCITY, the book that reveals how to achieve outstanding bottom-line results by integrating the world's three

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98

A Seat at the Table

Mark Schwartz

4.0

99

A Redneck's Guide to Kaizen: How to See Waste, Fix Work, and Cut Through Improvement Theater

Jason Hall

4.0

Every plant has a cart that pulls left.At Clear Fork Works they called it Ol' Lefty, and they had been steering it by hand so long that steering it by hand had become the job.Then somebody set an empty coffee can beside it and dropped in one steel washer every time a person corrected what the cart could not do for itself. By the end of the shift, fifty-three.Nobody had lied about the cart. Nobody

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100

Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact

Mike Burrows

4.0

Kanban from the Inside takes a distinctive approach to the Kanban Method — using a system of nine values to explain what it is, to give insight into how its practitioners think, and to offer practical advice on how to apply it. Readers new to Kanban will understand why and how it works, while those with experience will appreciate its fresh perspective and the connections it makes with a range of r