We've ranked the best lean startup books using expert recommendations, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
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 professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.
The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.
Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
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]
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The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
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 this international bestseller to avoid a similar fate.
Clay Christensen—who authored the award-winning Harvard Business Review article “How Will You Measure Your Life?”—explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says a successful company with established products WILL get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
Sharp, cogent, provocative, and one of the most influential business books of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager or entrepreneur should be without. Add this newly released edition to your library.
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]
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]
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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 this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.
Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.
Find a problem worth solving, then define a solution Engage your customers throughout the development cycle Continually test your product with smaller, faster iterations Build a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the idea Know when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s course Maximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focus Learn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of funding
Get on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.
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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]
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Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
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]
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The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
Steve Blank, Bob Dorf
4.4
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 products Offers a wealth of detailed instruction on how to get, keep, and grow customers recognizing the different techniques for web and physical channels And teaches a "new math" for startups: "metrics that matter for fueling growth"
The Startup Owner's Manual is a step-by-step, near-encyclopedic reference manual or "how to" for building a successful, scalable startup. Want to know what to do the first, week, month or year? What's the right distribution channel for your product? How to get traffic to your web site? …and how to activate customers or users on arrival? Who are the right "first customers," and why? …plus many more great tips in nearly 500 pages, complete with index, glossary, and Customer Development Checklists
It's the indispensible reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.
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Recommended by Steve Blank, Bill Earner, and Stephen Jeske.
Bill Earner
The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank is a more full on version of the Lean Startup and is a real how to manual for customer development [source]
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UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein
4.3
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 to market.
No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.
Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle Understand why you should design a test before you design a product Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality
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Recommended by Dan Olsen, Laura Klein, Steve Krug, and 1 others.
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Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
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 early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.
This third edition brings Moore's classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore's most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in Crossing the Chasm to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.
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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]
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]
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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, step-by-step guidance and advice.
The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing.
If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: - Determine your target customers - Identify underserved customer needs - Create a winning product strategy - Decide on your Minimally Viable Product (MVP) - Design your MVP prototypeTest your MVP with customers - Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit
This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia.
Executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find "The Lean Product Playbook" an indispensable, hands-on resource.
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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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The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win
Steve Blank
4.3
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 existing ones.
Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.
Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book.
Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when
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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Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
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- practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.
Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to -the business model generation!-
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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]
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Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith
4.3
If you liked "Business Model Generation," you'll love "Value Proposition Design." The sequel builds on the same visual format and practical tools that made the first one so useful. It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It compliments and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvasfrom "Business Model Generation" so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models.
Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work. The book includes an online access to Strategyzer.com to complete and assess exercises interactively, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.
You'll love "Value Proposition Design" if you've been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea."Value Proposition Design" will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work, and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.
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Recommended by Nir Eyal, Steve Blank, Ashley Hathaway, and 2 others.
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]
Chandini Jain
One of the five books Chandini would you recommend to young people interested in her career path. [source]
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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. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without.
Understand Lean Startup, analytics fundamentals, and the data-driven mindset Look at six sample business models and how they map to new ventures of all sizes Find the One Metric That Matters to you Learn how to draw a line in the sand, so you’ll know it’s time to move forward Apply Lean Analytics principles to large enterprises and established products
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]
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Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krug
4.3
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, over 400,000 Web designers and developers have relied on Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.
In this 3rd edition, Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don’t Make Me Think a classic-–with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read.
If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.
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Recommended by Brian Armstrong, Jeff Atwood, Ken Norton, and 13 others.
Anoop Anthony
Krug was teaching usability two decades ago when UX wasn't a buzzword, and the WWW was still in its nascent stages. (The first edition of this book was published in 2000!) I cut my teeth on Don't make me think back when I first started out in the industry. It is now in its third edition and still relevant — it offers compelling insights into building great user experiences into websites and applications. [source]
Auston Bunsen
I’m actually a self-taught programmer, so these books have really helped me with practical skills that I could put to use & yield results. The return on investment for these kinds of books is off the charts for me! [source]
Chris Goward
Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: … Don't Make Me Think. [source]
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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 learning from real users into their Agile process.
Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of your Agile product team, and gather feedback early and often. You'll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change--for the better.
Frame a vision of the problem you're solving and focus your team on the right outcomes Bring the designers' toolkit to the rest of your product team Share your insights with your team much earlier in the process Create Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are valid Incorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycle Make your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile's Scrum framework Understand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UX
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Recommended by Andy Budd and Laura Klein.
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Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth
Ash Maurya
4.2
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 author of the startup cult classic Running Lean Ash Maurya offers a tactical handbook for measuring and scaling a tech startup with maximum efficiency and efficacy. Maurya pairs real-world examples of startups like Airbnb and Dropbox with techniques and language from the manufacturing world to create a new model for measuring and describing an early stage startup's success. Scaling Lean is an indispensable handbook for startup founders graduating from the incubator stage to build their business in the real world.
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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The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
Eric Ries
4.2
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 successful startups - building minimal viable products ("MVPs"), extensive customer-focused testing based on a build, measure, learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to a whole new group of organizations: iconic multinationals like GE and Toyota, Silicon Valley tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio. Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a new management system that leads to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential roadmap for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.
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Recommended by Reid Hoffman, Aaron Levie, Arianna Huffington, and 5 others.
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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The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
4.2
A seminal work by bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen, now updated with fresh examples.
In the international bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen exposed the Achilles’ heel of many companies: by ignoring the disruptive technologies that evolve to displace them, they help initiate their own demise. In The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen and Michael Raynor take the idea of disruption one step further—explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves.
Now with several new chapters and updated cases, this revised and expanded edition shows how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen (author of the award-winning Harvard Business Review article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”), Raynor, and new coauthor Derek van Bever give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine.
Citing in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is an important addition to any innovation library and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders.
Published by Harvard Business Review Press.
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Recommended by Steve Blank, Ken Norton, Ashley Hathaway, and 2 others.
Ashley Hathaway
When it comes to work books I definitely like to ask my leaders what their favorite books are. There are lots of repeats (Crossing the Chasm, Innovator's Dilemma & Solution, Lean Startup, etc), but every now and then someone will have a really unique one that I’ll read. I always read those right away. I’ve also taken book recommendations & then not read the book for like a year. I’ll go back and say, “Hey I finally read that book you recommended forever ago.” It’s fun. [source]
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The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer
Jeffrey Liker
4.2
"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, product development, and process excellence. The result is an amazing business success story: steadily taking market share from price-cutting competitors, earning far more profit than any other automaker, and winning the praise of business leaders worldwide.
The Toyota Way reveals the management principles behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability. Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a renowned authority on Toyota's Lean methods, explains how you can adopt these principles--known as the "Toyota Production System" or "Lean Production"--to improve the speed of your business processes, improve product and service quality, and cut costs, no matter what your industry.
Drawing on his extensive research on Toyota, Dr. Liker shares his insights into the foundational principles at work in the Toyota culture. He explains how the Toyota Production System evolved as a new paradigm of manufacturing excellence, transforming businesses across industries. You'll learn how Toyota fosters employee involvement at all levels, discover the difference between traditional process improvement and Toyota's Lean improvement, and learn why companies often think they are Lean--but aren't.
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The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits, Eric Ries
4.2
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 combines the concepts of customer insight, rapid experimentation, and actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to allow individuals, teams, or even entire companies to solve problems, create value, and ramp up their vision quickly and efficiently.
The belief that innovative outliers like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have some super-human ability to envision the future and build innovative products to meet needs that have yet to arise is a fallacy that too many fall prey to. This 'Myth of the Visionary' does nothing but get in the way of talented managers, investors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Taking a proven, measured approach, The Lean Entrepreneur will have you engaging customers, reducing time to market and budgets, and stressing your organization's focus on the power of loyal customers to build powerhouse new products and companies. This guide will show you how to:
Apply actionable tips and tricks from successful lean entrepreneurs with proven track records Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt markets and create altogether new markets Use minimum viable products to drive strategy and conduct efficient market testing Quickly develop cross-functional innovation teams to overcome typical startup roadblocks The Lean Entrepreneur is your complete guide to getting your startup moving in the right direction quickly and hyper-efficiently.
Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers
Giff Constable
4.2
Recommended by Ron Conway, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, and 1 others.
Ron Conway
Explains how to do the customer development interviews in a way that will get you the most accurate and actionable feedback. [source]
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The Practice of Management
Peter F. Drucker
4.2
A classic since its publication in 1954, The Practice of Management was the first book to look at management as a whole and being a manager as a separate responsibility. The Practice of Management created the discipline of modern management practices. Readable, fundamental, and basic, it remains an essential book for students, aspiring managers, and seasoned professionals.
Recommended by William Hopper.
William Hopper
Well, my interest was first stimulated by my elder brother and co-author Ken. As an engineer, he had worked for many different companies in Britain and the US and been struck by the enormous differences which existed in managerial styles between these two countries. Although each enjoyed strengths and weaknesses, the American version was, in his opinion, much superior. This started him off on a lifelong study of what you might call ‘comparative national managerial cultures’. He began to write a book about it way back in the 1970s, but regrettably took ill and became a chronic invalid soon after. As a result, his book would be put on hold for many years. About seven years ago, I said to him that it was a very important book and persuaded him that we should try to produce it together and so we co-wrote our book, The Puritan Gift. [source]
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The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
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 fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .
Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
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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]
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Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy
Cindy Alvarez
4.2
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 behave, the problems they need to solve, and what frustrates and delights them. These insights may shake your assumptions, but they'll help you reach the "ah-ha!" moments that inspire truly great products.
Validate or invalidate your hypothesis by talking to the right people Learn how to conduct successful customer interviews play-by-play Detect a customer's behaviors, pain points, and constraints Turn interview insights into Minimum Viable Products to validate what customers will use and buy Adapt customer development strategies for large companies, conservative industries, and existing products
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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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Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money
Pat Flynn
4.2
Stop rushing into businesses born from half-baked ideas, misguided theories, and other forms of self-delusion. A lack of proper validation kills more businesses than anything else. As Joel Barker says, “Speed is only useful if you’re running in the right direction.” Will It Fly? will help you make sure you are clear for takeoff. It answers questions like:
- Does your business idea have merit? - Will it succeed in the market you’re trying to serve, or will it just be a waste of time and resources? - Is it a good idea for you?
In other words, will it fly?
Chock-full of practical suggestions you can apply to your business idea today, Will It Fly? combines action-based exercises and real-world case studies with anecdotes from the author’s personal experience of making money online, hosting successful podcasts, testing niche sites, and launching several online businesses.
Will It Fly? will challenge you to think critically, act deliberately, and dare greatly. You can think of the book as your business flight manual, something you can refer to for honest and straight-forward advice as you begin to test your idea and build a business that takes off and soars.
In five parts, Will It Fly? will guide you through the validation of your next business idea:
- Part one, Mission Design, helps you make sure your target idea aligns with and supports your goals.
- Part two, Development Lab, walks you through uncovering important details about your idea that you haven't even thought about.
- Part three, Flight Planning, is all about assessing current market conditions.
- Part four, Flight Simulator, focuses on the actual validating and testing of an idea with a small segment of a target market.
- Finally, Part five, All Systems Go, is for final analysis to help you make sure your idea is one you are ready to move forward with.
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Recommended by Vincent Pugliese and 1 others.
Vincent Pugliese
Question: What books would you recommend to young people to be prepared for the future workplaces? Answer: So many! So many by Seth Godin (Linchpin, The Icarus Deception, Purple Cow) Essentialism by Greg McKeown, Deep Work by Cal Newport, The Choice by Og Mandino, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, No More Dreaded Mondays and 48 Days To The Work You Love by Dan Miller, The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran, Will It Fly by Pat Flynn, The Traveler's Gift by Andy Andrews, QBQ by John Miller, The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Wow, there are so many more, but that’s a start. [source]
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Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale
Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky, Barry O'Reilly
4.2
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 studies, you’ll learn how successful enterprises have rethought everything from governance and financial management to systems architecture and organizational culture in the pursuit of radically improved performance. Adopting Lean will take time and commitment, but it’s vital for harnessing the cultural and technical forces that are accelerating the rate of innovation.
* Discover how Lean focuses on people and teamwork at every level, in contrast to traditional management practices * Approach problem-solving experimentally, by exploring solutions, testing assumptions, and getting feedback from real users * Lead and manage large-scale programs in a way that empowers employees, increases the speed and quality of delivery, and lowers costs * Learn how to implement ideas from the DevOps and Lean Startup movements even in complex, regulated environments
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The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
4.2
"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 into customer interviews and understand how your product can be developed to meet your customers' needs."
- Dan Martell, Founder of Flowtown, angel investor
Customer Development is a four-step framework for helping startups discover and validate their customers, product, and go-to-market strategy, developed by Steve Blank and an integral part of Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology. Focused on the Customer Discovery step, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development is an easy to follow guide for finding early adopters, building a Minimum Viable Product, finding Product-Market fit, and establishing a sales and marketing roadmap.
Deemed a "must-read" by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, inside you will find detailed customer development and lean startup concept definitions, a step-by-step approach to best practices, a business model analysis guide, case studies, rich graphics, as well as worksheets and exercises. No matter the stage of your business, you will return often to this guide to learn how to build a product people want;"get out of the building;" foster strong customer relationships; test business model risk; reach out to early adopters; conduct startup marketing; create a customer funnel based on buyers' process; and prepare your startup to scale up.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany, affectionately known as the "CustDev book," serves as course text for classes at Stanford University, University of Chicago, Boston University, DePaul University, University of Minnesota and University of Norway.
"Our UCL (University College London) students love The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. Thanks to Brant & Patrick for writing this helpful book. "
- Dave Chapman, Deputy Head of the Department of Management Science and Innovation at UCL (University College London)
"Love it! Required reading for all NYU entrepreneurs."
- Frank Rimalovski, Managing Director of NYU Innovation Venture Fund
This book is both an introduction for those unfamiliar with lean concepts and highly actionable for lean practitioners. It is a user friendly guide, written to be accessible to marketing professionals, Engineers startup founders and entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, and anyone else involved in building scalable startups.
Existing companies will benefit to from applying Customer Development principles described in detail herein: for example, startups struggling to achieve market traction, or well established companies seeking to spark new innovation.
This is a business book for startups like no other. No fluff, but rather sound principles and concrete steps to take to build your business. Get up to speed on Customer Development now.
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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
4.2
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.
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Mind Your Business: Plan Your Business and Turn Your Creative Passion Into Your Full-Time Gig
Ilana Griffo
4.1
This is not your mama's business plan. Mind Your Business is created for entrepreneurial women (and men--you're welcome too!) who want to turn their creative passions into a full-time job. If you dream of building a business doing what you love, this book is for you. So you're sick of the hustle, and ready to take your talents to the next level, but the thought of taking the "leap" is intimidating. You know your craft, but the running a business seems overwhelming and scary. This workbook is designed to inspire you, to help you get organized, and to put you in the driver's seat, with actionable steps to help you achieve your dreams. Mind Your Business is for list lovers, creative spirits, go-getters, and driven women; it will be the the training wheels for your business--a sidekick, reference, guidebook, and the fuel for your creative journey.
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Kaizen: The Complete Guide to Implementing the Smart Concept of Continuous Improvement of All the Strategic Operations in the Development Process Involving the Lean and Agile Startup Team
Josh Wright
4.1
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Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research
Tomer Sharon, Noam Lamdan
4.1
Recommended by Steve Krug.
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(C)lean Messaging: A framework to help startup founders talk to humans
Scott Brown
4.1
What if your startup messaging for customers & investors was as clean as your code? The Lean Startup movement revolutionized how we build a modern startup. And yet, startup founders continue to struggle with how to talk about their amazing idea in a way that will generate media coverage, sales and social buzz. The (C)lean Messaging framework helps startup founders perfect their sales, marketing & investment messaging to focus on the listener.As a founder, advisor and investor, I hear dozens of startup pitches every week. And to be honest, most of them suck.After years of coaching founders on how to talk about their amazing ideas, I created a framework that will allow founders to extend their Lean & Value Prop Canvases into a new messaging framework. (C)lean Messaging will give you the tools you need to talk about your startup in a way that generates media coverage, sales and buzz.WARNING: If you use this framework, it
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The Lean Marketplace: a Practical Guide to Building a Successful Online Marketplace Business
Juho Makkonen and Cristóbal Gracia
4.1
Inspired by the success of platforms such as Airbnb, Etsy or Fiverr? Want to know how to build an online marketplace business?
You've come to the right place. In this step by step guide, we will go through everything you need to know about developing your idea into a sustainable business, offering lots of practical advice and actionable ideas along the way.
This book is the result of two experts putting almost two decades of experience together, in order to create a repeatable method for creating a successful online marketplace. The applicable tactics and techniques can be studied in advance, helping you avoid the most common pitfalls.
This is what this book is about. It's a handbook for anyone building an online marketplace. The same methods will apply whether your organization is a startup, a cooperative, a non-profit, or a big brand. Not every marketplace will be as big as Airbnb and Uber, but we believe there are thousands of marketplace ideas out there that can make for great, sustainable businesses. With the help of this book, you're one step closer to building the next one.
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Machine that Changed the World
James P. Womack
4.1
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 defeatist about the Japanese threat, and tougher protectionism, are not the answers. This book outlines the enormous tasks facing Western companies in the 1990s and has cogent messages for Japanese firms as well, as they move abroad. The Machine That Changed the World is based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken in any industry: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology five-million-dollar, five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program's study of the worldwide auto industry. Twice in this century the auto industry has changed our most fundamental ideas about how to make things. Now it is doing it again. Just as mass production swept away craft production, so a new way of making things, called lean production, is now rapidly making mass production obsolete. Lean production is the Japanese secret weapon in the industrial wars and is spreading throughout the world. If Western companies and their managers and workers are to survive in the 1990s, they must learn and adapt to lean production. Some of the smartest already have begun to do so. Lean production welds the activities of everyone from top management to line workers, to suppliers, into a tightly integrated whole that can respond almost instantly to marketing demands from consumers. It can also double production and quality, while keeping costs down. Its adoption, as it inevitably spreads beyond the auto industry, will change almost every industry and consequently how we work, how we live, and the fate of companies and nations as they respond to its impact. In clear and compelling terms, this book explains what lean production is, and its global implications for all of us.
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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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Toyota Production System: Beyond large-scale production
Taiichi Ohno
4.1
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 philosophical description of just-in-time and Lean manufacturing, this work is a must read for all students of human progress. On a more practical level, it continues to provide inspiration and instruction for those seeking to improve efficiency through the elimination of waste.
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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]
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The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development
Donald G. Reinertsen
4.1
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.
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Lean B2B: Build Products Businesses Want
Étienne Garbugli, Annemarie Vander Veen, François Maisonneuve
4.1
www.leanb2bbook.com
« This is a must read for every B2B entrepreneur, SaaS creator or consultant and business school student. It's the kind of book you don't read once, you go back to it on a regular basis. » - Carmen Gerea, CEO & Co-founder, UsabilityChefs
Lean B2B helps entrepreneurs and innovators quickly find traction in the enterprise.
Used by thousands around the world and packed with more than 20 case studies, Lean B2B consolidates the best thinking around Business- to-Business (B2B) customer development to help entrepreneurs and innovators focus on the right things each step of the way, leaving as little as possible to luck.
The book helps:
• Assess the market potential of opportunities to find the right opportunity for your team • Find early adopters, quickly establish credibility and convince business stakeholders to work with you • Find and prioritize business problems in corporations and identify the stakeholders with the power to influence a purchase decision • Create a minimum viable product and a compelling offer, validate a solution and evaluate whether your team has found product-market fit • Identify and avoid common challenges faced by entrepreneurs and learn ninja techniques to speed up product-market validation
« The book will pay itself off in the first couple of pages! » - Ben Sardella, Co-Founder, Datanyze
« Treat this book like a map to show you where you are and a compass to show you the direction. I wish I could have read it 2 or 3 years ago. » – Jonathan Gebauer, Founder, exploreB2B
« Lean B2B is filled with rock-solid advice for technology entrepreneurs who want a rapid-growth trajectory. Read it to increase your certainty and your success rate. » - Jill Konrath, Author of AGILE SELLING and Selling to Big Companies
« Probably the most slept on book in the Lean startup market right now.... There is no sugarcoating here. Garbugli tells you exactly what needs to happen and how to make it happen... literally holds your hand and spells it out. I was really impressed with the overall depth and advice presented. » - AJ, B2B Entrepreneur
« The book I read of which I have learned the most. » - Etienne Thouin, Founder and CTO, SQLNext Software
« This book is essential reading for would-be entrepreneurs who face the daunting task of entering B2B markets. » – Paul Gillin, Co-Author, Social Marketing to the Business Customer
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The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work
Ben Hartman
4.1
A practical, systems-based approach for a more sustainable farming operation
To many people today, using the words "factory" and "farm" in the same sentence is nothing short of sacrilege. In many cases, though, the same sound business practices apply whether you are producing cars or carrots. Author Ben Hartman and other young farmers are increasingly finding that incorporating the best new ideas from business into their farming can drastically cut their wastes and increase their profits, making their farms more environmentally and economically sustainable. By explaining the lean system for identifying and eliminating waste and introducing efficiency in every aspect of the farm operation, The Lean Farm makes the case that small-scale farming can be an attractive career option for young people who are interested in growing food for their community. Working smarter, not harder, also prevents the kind of burnout that start-up farmers often encounter in the face of long, hard, backbreaking labor.
Lean principles grew out of the Japanese automotive industry, but they are now being followed on progressive farms around the world. Using examples from his own family's one-acre community-supported farm in Indiana, Hartman clearly instructs other small farmers in how to incorporate lean practices in each step of their production chain, from starting a farm and harvesting crops to training employees and selling goods. While the intended audience for this book is small-scale farmers who are part of the growing local food movement, Hartman's prescriptions for high-value, low-cost production apply to farms and businesses of almost any size or scale that hope to harness the power of lean in their production processes.
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The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership: Achieving and Sustaining Excellence through Leadership Development
Liker
4.1
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 simply performing their singular function to delivering value across all functions. Case studies from Toyota clearly illustrate the methods that create powerful, effective Lean leadership. Contents Introduction: The Roots of Toyota's Global Business Leadership Chapter 1. Leading in the Toyota Way: A Lifelong Journey Chapter 2. Self-Development: Reliably Identifying and Coaching Developing Leaders at the Gemba Chapter 3. Coach and Develop Others Chapter 4. Daily Kaizen: Continually Developing Leadership from the Bottom Up Chapter 5. Hoshin Kanri: Align Vision, Goals, and Plans for Continuous Improvement Chapter 6. Toyota Leadership Turning Around Dana Corporation Chapter 7. Learning from Toyota Leadership About the Authors: Jeffrey K. Liker, Gary L.Convis Jeffrey K. Liker is Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan and a teacher and consultant through Liker Lean Advisors. Gary L. Convis is a former President and CEO of, and current consultant to, Dana Holding Corporation.
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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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The Lean Enterprise: How Corporations Can Innovate Like Startups
Trevor Owens and Obie Fernandez
4.1
Discover the methods of lean startups that can revolutionize large organizations and their products
Even in a tough economic climate, the startup business community has found a way to create innovative, game-changing products in shockingly short timeframes. So why should larger, more established companies take notice? Because they have everything to gain when they examine and adopt the strategies, tools, and attitudes of these smaller competitors. The Lean Enterprise presents a groundbreaking design for revolutionizing larger organizations, one that draws on the ingenious tenets and practices espoused by the startup community. The guidelines in this book will help companies shake the lethargy, bureaucracy, and power struggles that plague large organizations and hold them back from true innovation.
At the heart of this resource is a comprehensive, practical approach based on methods, timetables, compensation, financial investment, and case studies that reveal the startup mentality. Respected thought leaders in lean startup methodologies, the authors cover successful enterprise development, development innovation labs, corporate venture arms, and acquisition and integration of startups.
- Essential reading for entrepreneurs, product managers, executives and directors in Forbes 2000 organizations, and board members - Presents the tools and methodologies large businesses need to compete with a new generation of highly-empowered entrepreneurs - Covers lean startup culture and principles and identifies the behaviors that arestunting growth at large enterprises - Offers a comprehensive, practical approach for developing exciting products and services and opening vast new markets
Don't be mystified by the success of startups. Master the methods of this new generation of entrepreneurs and compete on a level playing field.
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Lean from the Trenches
Henrik Kniberg
4.1
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. You'll walk through the project step by step, from customer engagement, to the daily "cocktail party," version control, bug tracking, and release. In this honest look at what works--and what doesn't--you'll find out how to: Make quality everyone's business, not just the testers. Keep everyone moving in the same direction without micromanagement. Use simple and powerful metrics to aid in planning and process improvement. Balance between low-level feature focus and high-level system focus. You'll be ready to jump into the trenches and streamline your own development process.
Contents
Foreword Preface
PART I: HOW WE WORK
1. About the Project 1.1 Timeline 5 1.2 How We Sliced the Elephant 6 1.3 How We Involved the Customer 7
2. Structuring the Teams
3. Attending the Daily Cocktail Party 3.1 First Tier: Feature Team Daily Stand-up 3.2 Second Tier: Sync Meetings per Specialty 3.3 Third Tier: Project Sync Meeting
4. The Project Board 4.1 Our Cadences 4.2 How We Handle Urgent Issues and Impediments
5. Scaling the Kanban Boards
6. Tracking the High-Level Goal
7. Defining Ready and Done 7.1 Ready for Development 7.2 Ready for System Test 7.3 How This Improved Collaboration
8. Handling Tech Stories 8.1 Example 1: System Test Bottleneck 8.2 Example 2: Day Before the Release 8.3 Example 3: The 7-Meter Class
9. Handling Bugs 9.1 Continuous System Test 9.2 Fix the Bugs Immediately 9.3 Why We Limit the Number of Bugs in the Bug Tracker 9.4 Visualizing Bugs 9.5 Preventing Recurring Bugs
10. Continuously Improving the Process 10.1 Team Retrospectives 10.2 Process Improvement Workshops 10.3 Managing the Rate of Change
11. Managing Work in Progress 11.1 Using WIP Limits 11.2 Why WIP Limits Apply Only to Features
12. Capturing and Using Process Metrics 12.1 Velocity (Features per Week) 12.2 Why We Don’t Use Story Points 12.3 Cycle Time (Weeks per Feature) 12.4 Cumulative Flow 12.5 Process Cycle Efficiency
13. Planning the Sprint and Release 13.1 Backlog Grooming 13.2 Selecting the Top Ten Features 13.3 Why We Moved Backlog Grooming Out of the Sprint Planning Meeting 13.4 Planning the Release
14. How We Do Version Control 14.1 No Junk on the Trunk 14.2 Team Branches 14.3 System Test Branch
15. Why We Use Only Physical Kanban Boards
16. What We Learned 16.1 Know Your Goal 16.2 Experiment 16.3 Embrace Failure 16.4 Solve Real Problems 16.5 Have Dedicated Change Agents 16.6 Involve People
PART II: A CLOSER LOOK AT THE TECHNIQUES
17. Agile and Lean in a Nutshell 17.1 Agile in a Nutshell 17.2 Lean in a Nutshell 17.3 Scrum in a Nutshell 17.4 XP in a Nutshell 17.5 Kanban in a Nutshell
18. Reducing the Test Automation Backlog 18.1 What to Do About It 18.2 How to Improve Test Coverage a Little Bit Each Iteration 18.3 Step 1: List Your Test Cases 18.4 Step 2: Classify Each Test 18.5 Step 3: Sort the List in Priority Order 18.6 Step 4: Automate a Few Tests Each Iteration 18.7 Does This Solve the Problem?
19. Sizing the Backlog with Planning Poker 19.1 Estimating Without Planning Poker 19.2 Estimating with Planning Poker 19.3 Special Cards
20. Cause-Effect Diagrams 20.1 Solve Problems, Not Symptoms 20.2 The Lean Problem-Solving Approach: A3 Thinking 20.3 How to Use Cause-Effect Diagrams 20.4 Example 1: Long Release Cycle 20.5 Example 2: Defects Released to Production 20.6 Example 3: Lack of Pair Programming 20.7 Example 4: Lots of Problems 20.8 Practical Issues: How to Create and Maintain the Diagrams 20.9 Pitfalls 20.10 Why Use Cause-Effect Diagrams?
21. Final Words
A1. Glossary: How We Avoid Buzzword Bingo Index
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Lean Six Sigma: The Complete Guide to Combine the Six Sigma Process and Lean Production Speed to Instantly Grow Your Start Up
Homer Herring
4.1
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43
Slicing Pie Handbook: Perfectly Fair Equity Splits for Bootstrapped Startups
Mike Moyer
4.1
Entrepreneurs and early-stage company participants get taken advantage of so frequently that we hardly notice. Bad equity deals are the rule, not the exception. The Slicing Pie Handbook outlines a framework for perfectly fair equity splits for early-stage, bootstrapped startup companies. Based on model popularized by the book Slicing Pie. The Slicing Pie Handbook will help you determine the right share for people who contribute the things you need to start your company including help, equipment, supplies, rent and even credit. You will learn how to fairly allocate equity when people contribute and how to fairly recover equity when people leave the company. Topics covered include: - The popular Slicing Pie equity model including allocation and recovery - A detailed "retrofit" guide in case you already have a dreaded "fixed" equity split - Legal and tax considerations - Tips for implementation including the use of the online Pie Slicer software
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Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results
Mike Rother
4.1
"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 people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as: How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization? How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance? How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers? Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata--a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter; and Coaching Kata: a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting. With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.
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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 to address a wider range of important VSM issues than any other such book, including the psychology of change, leadership, creating teams, building consensus, and charter development.
Karen Martin is principal consultant for Karen Martin & Associates, LLC, instructor for the University of California, San Diego's Lean Enterprise program, and industry advisor to the University of San Diego's Industrial and Systems Engineering program. Mike Osterling provides support and leadership to manufacturing and non-manufacturing organizations on their Lean Transformation Journey. In a continuous improvement leadership role for six years, Mike played a key role in Square D Company's lean transformation in the 1990s.
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Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit
Mary Poppendieck / Tom Poppendieck Poppendieck / Poppendieck
4.1
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 identify seven fundamental "lean" principles, adapt them for the world of software development, and show how they can serve as the foundation for agile development approaches that work. Along the way, they introduce 22 "thinking tools" that can help you customize the right agile practices for any environment.
Better, cheaper, faster software development. You can have all three-if you adopt the same lean principles that have already revolutionized manufacturing, logistics and product development.
Iterating towards excellence: software development as an exercise in discovery Managing uncertainty: "decide as late as possible" by building change into the system. Compressing the value stream: rapid development, feedback, and improvement Empowering teams and individuals without compromising coordination Software with integrity promoting coherence, usability, fitness, maintainability, and adaptability How to "see the whole"-even when your developers are scattered across multiple locations and contractors Simply put, Lean Software Development helps you refocus development on value, flow, and people-so you can achieve breakthrough quality, savings, speed, and business alignment.
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47
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights
Steve Portigal
4.1
Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable interviewing techniques and tools that enable you to conduct informative interviews with anyone. You'll move from simply gathering data to uncovering powerful insights about people.
Interviewing Users will explain how to succeed with interviewing, including:
* Embracing how other people see the world * Building rapport to create engaging and exciting interactions * Listening in order to build rapport.
With this book, Steve Portigal uses stories and examples from his 15 years of experience to show how interviewing can be incorporated into the design process, helping you learn the best and right information to inform and inspire your design.
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Recommended by Laura Klein.
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Traversing the Traction Gap: Developing a Market-First Mindset to Engineer Your Go-To-Market Success
Bruce Cleveland and Wildcat Venture Partners
4.1
Vision, groundbreaking ideas, total commitment, and boundless enthusiasm characterize most startups, but they require capital to go from promising product in a potential blockbuster category to scalable business. However scrappy they are, industry statistics show that more than 80 percent of all early-stage startups fail. Most can build a product, but the vast majority stumble when it comes time to take those products to market due to poor or non-existent "market engineering" skills. Traversing the Traction Gap exposes the reasons behind that scary failure rate and provides a prescriptive how-to guide, focused specifically on market engineering techniques, so startups can succeed. Getting over the go-to-market hurdle stymies startups again and again. Just when they need to develop and define a category and create sophisticated positioning, demand-generation and revenue-conversion programs--when they must establish a foothold in the market--they run short on time and money. This is the Traction Gap, that period of time between introducing a new product into the market and being able to scale it during a rapidly closing window of opportunity. Traversing the Traction Gap is a practical guidebook for navigating this fraught period in the tumultuous early life of a startup. Based on real-life examples from the startup world, Cleveland's advice provides a roadmap, signposts, and metrics for succeeding where others have failed.
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49
The New Business Road Test: What Entrepreneurs and Executives Should Do Before Writing a Business Plan
John Mullins
4.1
The New Business Road Test shows how to assess market opportunities. Building on lessons learned by studying numerous entrepreneurs, the book details the author's seven domains model for assessing new business ideas. The model is comprised of four market and industry domains and three related to the entrepreneurial team. These seven domains address the central questions in the assessment of any market opportunity: Are the market and industry attractive? Does the opportunity offer compelling customer benefits as well as distinct advantage over othe solutions to the customer's needs? Can the team deliver the results they seek and promise to others?
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50
The Toyota Engagement Equation: How to Understand and Implement Continuous Improvement Thinking in Any Organization
Tracey Richardson
4.1
From two Toyota insiders--a practical, proven formula for developing a successful Lean culture in any organization
In 1986, Toyota opened a factory in rural Kentucky and unveiled TPS, its revolutionary management system. While most manufacturers and organizations now use Lean methods, the application is almost always superficial and confined within existing management frameworks. Consequently, the groundbreaking transformation that allowed Toyota to flourish against incredible odds has rarely been replicated.
Toyota's Engagement Equation is a valuable guide to developing a Lean culture that is practical, compelling, and truly reflective of Toyota's unique approach. The authors, two Americans who worked at the Kentucky facility and were trained by Japanese mentors, present an accessible method for replicating Toyota's success in any organization. Step by step, you'll learn how to internalize Toyota's principles and successfully assimilate them into your daily work.
Highlights:
- A personal, first-hand account of Toyota's cultural practices in action - Introduces a practical, accessible approach to applying Lean methods in any organization - Unique insights on subjects such as global influences, the nature of work, and the triumph of empowering workers - Anecdotes and stories from noted Lean leaders, former mentors, and employees of Toyota's Kentucky facility
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Intercom On Starting Up
Des Traynor, Eoghan McCabe, et al.
4.1
With the insane volume of startup literature already out there writing this book wasn’t a no-brainer for us. No one wants to add to the scrap heap. But if you restrict yourself to only reading articles from people who have actually created a business, hit some revenue target, or broken out of the MVP-in-an-incubator stage, there’s very few books and blogs left. This is why we hope this book is relevant to you.
It’s not packed with startup clichés, nor is it steeped in myths about how huge companies got their break. Yes, Airbnb sold cereal before they were a 31 billion dollar company, and Slack was one hell of a pivot, but those wells have been over-drilled for their useful lessons at this point. This book is our honest, opinionated take on what we’ve learned building Intercom over the past 6 years. You won’t like it all, you won’t agree with it all, but you’re not supposed to. Your mileage will vary.
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Lean Mastery Collection: 8 Books in 1 - Lean Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Enterprise, Lean Analytics, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Scrum, Kaizen ... for Scrum, Kanban, Sprint, DSDM XP & Crystal)
Jeffrey Ries
4.1
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53
Testing with Humans: How to Use Experiments to Drive Faster, More Informed Decision Making.
Giff Constable and Frank Rimalovski
4.1
Testing with Humans, the sequel to bestseller Talking to Humans, teaches entrepreneurs, innovation teams, and product teams how to run effective experiments. An experiment is a test designed to help you answer the questions
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The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition
Steven J. Spear
4.1
Generate Better, Faster Results-- Using Less Capital and Fewer Resources!
"[The High-Velocity Edge] contains ideas that form the basis for structured continuous learning and improvement in every aspect of our lives. While this book is tailored to business leaders, it should be read by high school seniors, college students, and those already in the workforce. With the broad societal application of these ideas, we can achieve levels of accomplishment not even imagined by most people." The Honorable Paul H. O'Neill, former CEO and Chairman, Alcoa, and Former Secretary of the Treasury
"Some firms outperform competitors in many ways at once--cost, speed, innovation, service. How? Steve Spear opened my eyes to the secret of systemizing innovation: taking it from the occasional, unpredictable 'stroke of genius' to something you and your people do month-in, month-out to outdistance rivals." Scott D. Cook, founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit, Inc.
"Steven Spear connects a deep study of systems with practical management insights and does it better than any organizational scholar I know. [This] is a profoundly important book that will challenge and inspire executives in all industries to think more clearly about the technical and social foundations of organizational excellence." Donald M. Berwick, M.D., M.P.P., President and CEO, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
About the Book
How can some companies perform so well that their industry counterparts are competitors in name only? Although they operate in the same industry, serve the same market, and even use the same suppliers, these extraordinary, high-velocity organizations consistently outperform all the competition--and, more importantly, continually widen their leads.
In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.
While he investigates several great operational triumphs, like top-tier teaching hospitals' fantastic improvements in quality of care, Pratt & Whitney's competitive gains in jet engine design, and the U.S. Navy's breakthroughs in inventing and applying nuclear propulsion, The High-Velocity Edge is not just about the adoration of success. It also takes a critical look at some of the operational missteps that have humbled even the most reputable and respected of companies and organizations. The decades-long prominence of Toyota, for example, is contrasted with the many factors leading to the automaker's sweeping 2010 product recalls. Taken together, these multiple perspectives and in-depth case studies show how to:
Build a system of "dynamic discovery" designed to reveal operational problems and weaknesses as they arise Attack and solve problems when and where they occur, converting weaknesses into strengths Disseminate knowledge gained from solving local problems throughout the company as a whole Create managers invested in developing everyone's capacity to continually innovate and improve Whatever kind of company you operate-- from technology to fi nance to healthcare-- mastery of these four key capabilities will put you on the fast track to operational excellence, where you will generate faster, better results--using less capital and fewer resources.
Apply the lessons of Steven J. Spear and gain a high-velocity edge over every competitor in your industry.
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Lean Production Simplified: A Plain-Language Guide to the World's Most Powerful Production System
Pascal Dennis
4.1
Following in the tradition of its Shingo Prize-winning predecessors, Lean Production Simplified, Third Edition gives a clear overview of the structure and tools of the Lean production system. Written for the practitioner by a practitioner, it delivers a comprehensive insider's view of Lean management. The author helps readers grasp the system as a whole, as well as the factors that animate it, by organizing the book around an image of a house of Lean production. Illustrating the eight kinds of waste, this updated edition of a bestseller: Describes the craft and mass production systems that preceded Lean production including the contributions of Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford Explains the concepts of visual management, Five S, and Total Productive Maintenance Addresses just-in-time delivery of parts and products Examines the jidoka principle Covers the nervous system of Lean management, hoshin planning Illustrates the culture of Lean management This edition deepens and extends the previous edition with case studies on Lean outside the factory in settings such as health care, IT, finance, design, engineering, and beyond. The case studies are based on personal experience of actual work in organizations generating real results.Lean Production Simplified, Third Edition covers each of the components of Lean within the context of the Lean production system. The author's straightforward common sense approach makes this book an easily accessible, on-the-floor resource for every team member. Watch Shingo Prize-winning author Pascal Dennis discuss Lean Production Simplified, Third Edition https: //youtu.be/YD030vOb8KM
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The Toyota Way Fieldbook
JeffreyLiker and David Meier
4.1
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 from Toyota and develop systems that fit their unique cultures.
The book begins with a review of the principles of the Toyota Way through the 4Ps model-Philosophy, Processes, People and Partners, and Problem Solving. Readers looking to learn from Toyota's lean systems will be provided with the inside knowledge they need to
Define the companies purpose and develop a long-term philosophy Create value streams with connected flow, standardized work, and level production Build a culture to stop and fix problems Develop leaders who promote and support the system Find and develop exceptional people and partners Learn the meaning of true root cause problem solving Lead the change process and transform the total enterprise The depth of detail provided draws on the authors combined experience of coaching and supporting companies in lean transformation. Toyota experts at the Georgetown, Kentucky plant, formally trained David Meier in TPS. Combined with Jeff Liker's extensive study of Toyota and his insightful knowledge the authors have developed unique models and ideas to explain the true philosophies and principles of the Toyota Production System.
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57
The Start-Up J Curve: The Six Steps to Entrepreneurial Success
Howard Love
4.1
A predictable pattern of success Entrepreneurs who have read early drafts of The Start-Up J Curve responded, ''I wish I had this book years ago.''
A start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern; the more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it. Author Howard Love calls this pattern the start-up J Curve: The toughest part of the endeavor is the time between the actual start of a new business and when the product and model are firmly established. The Start-Up J Curve gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to get through the early challenges so they can reach the primary value creation that lies beyond.
Love brings thirty-five years of start-up experience to this comprehensive guide to starting a business. He outlines the six predictable stages of start-up growth and details the activities that should be undertaken at each stage to ensure success and to avoid common pitfalls. Instead of feeling lost and confused after a setback, start-up founders and investors can anticipate the challenges, overcome the obstacles, and ride the curve to the top.
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Lean Analytics: How to Use Data to Track, Optimize, Improve and Accelerate Your Startup Business (Lean Guides with Scrum, Sprint, Kanban, DSDM, XP & Crystal Book 1)
Greg Caldwell
4.1
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59
Lean Out: The Struggle for Gender Equality in Tech and Start-Up Culture
Elissa Shevinsk
4.1
Why aren’t the great, qualified women already in tech being hired or promoted?
Should people who don’t fit in seek to join an institution that is actively hostile to them?
Does the tech industry deserve women leaders?
The split between the stated ideals of the corporate elite and the reality of working life for women in the tech industry—whether in large public tech companies or VC-backed start-ups, in anonymous gaming forums, or in Silicon Valley or Alley—seems designed to crush women’s spirits. Corporate manifestos by women who already fit in (or who are able to convincingly fake it) aren’t helping. There is a high cost for the generation of young women and transgender people currently navigating the harsh realities of the tech industry, who gave themselves to their careers only to be ignored, harassed and disrespected.
Not everyone can be a CEO; not everyone is able to embrace a workplace culture that diminishes the contributions of women and ignores real complaints. The very culture of high tech, where foosball tables and endless supplies of beer are de facto perks, but maternity leave and breast-feeding stations are controversial, is designed to appeal to young men. Lean Out collects 25 stories from the modern tech industry, from people who fought GamerGate and from women and transgender artists who have made their own games, from women who have started their own companies and who have worked for some of the most successful corporations in America, from LGBTQ women, from women of color, from transgender people and people who do not ascribe to a gender. All are fed up with the glacial pace of change in America’s tech industry.
Included are essays by Anna Anthropy, Leigh Alexander, Lauren Bacon, Katherine Cross, Dom DeGuzman, Fakegrimlock, Krys Freeman, Gesche Haas, Ash Huang, Jenni Lee, Katy Levinson, Leanne Pittsford, Brook Shelly, Elissa Shevinsky, and Squinky. Edited and selected by entrepreneur and tech veteran Elissa Shevinsky, Lean Out sees a possible way forward that uses tech and creative disengagement to jettison 20th century corporate culture: “I’ve figured out a way to create safe space for myself in tech,” writes Shevinsky. “I’ve left Silicon Valley, and now work remotely from home. I adore everyone on my team, because I hired them myself.”
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Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions, Third Edition
David Mann
4.1
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 outcome. It teaches you how to successfully navigate the politics in cross-functional process improvement projects, and to engage executives in ways that are personally meaningful to them. If you are a leader at any level in an organization undergoing or considering a Lean transformation, this is where you should start and finish ... and start again. Read the Reviews: "This book became an instant classic in the literature of professional operations. In this third edition, David Mann updates and expands his teaching with five additional years of valuable experience and expertise derived from his very active, multi-industry consultancy. I have benefitted greatly from his writing and wholeheartedly recommend this book to be top-of-the desk of any serious Lean practitioner or performance transformation leader." - Raymond C. Floyd, two-time Shingo Prize Winner, President and CEO, Plasco Energy Group "David Mann builds substantially on his seminal work on the Lean management system. The book is full of new insight and polishes the most important ideas about Lean management. The new chapter on engaging executive leadership alone is worth the price of the book." - Peter Ward, Richard M. Ross Professor and Chair, Department of Management Science, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University "This book has long been my 'go-to' guide on Lean management practices that help create a culture of continuous improvement and excellence. I have recommended the book to countless healthcare leaders who rave about how helpful it is in translating Lean principles into daily management behaviors. The healthcare examples make it even more relevant as a must read for any hospital leader who aims to move beyond Lean tools.." -Mark Graban, author of Lean Hospitals, co-author of Healthcare Kaizen and The Executive Guide to Healthcare Kaizen "As more companies outside the manufacturing sector pursue Lean transformations, Creating a Lean Culture is as critical a resource as ever. Breaking down silos and navigating tricky internecine politics remain a momentous challenge, and Mann's case-based insights are an invaluable tool." - Peg Pennington, Executive Director, Center for Operational Excellence, Fisher College of Business, The Ohio State University "David has once again taken the topics that trip us up and put structure and guidance around them. His new work on executive involvement is worth the price of the book all by itself. Many of us have struggled with this topic and David provides a path to success." - Elizabeth M. King, Vice President Organizational Effectiveness, ESCO Corporation
New in the Third Edition:
Contains new chapter on engaging executives in Lean initiatives Includes 21 new case studies Presents new examples from the healthcare and process industries Includes additional gemba worksheets for learning and teaching Lean Provides expanded coverage of Lean applications in complex cross functional value stream pr
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61
Lean Startups for Social Change: The Revolutionary Path to Big Impact
Michel Gelobter
4.1
For years, the lean startup has been revolutionizing both new and established businesses. In this eye-opening book, serial social entrepreneur Michel Gelobter shows how it can do the same for nonprofits. Traditionally, whether creating a new business or a new program, entrepreneurs in all sectors develop a plan, find money to fund it, and pursue it to its conclusion. The problem is, over time conditions can change drastically but you're locked into your plan. The lean startup is all about agility and flexibility. Its mantra is build, measure, learn: create small experimental initiatives, quickly get real-world feedback on them, and use that data to expand what works and discard what doesn't. Using dozens of social sector examples, Gelobter walks you through the process. The standard approach wastes time and money. The lean startup will help your organization vastly increase the good it does. "
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62
The Toyota Kata Practice Guide: Practicing Scientific Thinking Skills for Superior Results in 20 Minutes a Day
Mike Rother
4.1
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63
Faster, Better, Cheaper in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond
Christoph Roser
4.1
The industrial revolution, mechanization, water and steam power, computers, and automation have given an enormous boost to manufacturing productivity. "Faster, Better, Cheaper" in the History of Manufacturing shows how the ability to make products faster, better, and cheaper has evolved from the stone age to modern times. It explains how different developments over time have raised efficiency and allowed the production of more and better products with less effort and materials, and hence faster, better, and cheaper. In addition, it describes the stories of inventors, entrepreneurs, and industrialists and looks at the intersection between technology, society, machines, materials, management, and - most of all - humans.
"Faster, Better, Cheaper" in the History of Manufacturing follows this development throughout the ages. This book covers not only the technical aspects (mechanization, power sources, new materials, interchangeable parts, electricity, automation), but organizational innovations (division of labor, Fordism, Talyorism, Lean). Most of all, it is a story of the people that invented, manufactured, and marketed the products.
The book shows how different developments over time raised efficiency and allowed production of more with less effort and materials, which brought us a large part of the wealth and prosperity we enjoy today. The stories of real inventors and industrialists are told, which includes not only their successes but also their problems and failures. The effect of good or bad management on manufacturing is a recurring theme in many chapters, as is the fight for intellectual property through thrilling tales of espionage. This is a story of successes and failures. It is not only about technology but also about social aspects. Ultimately, it is not a book about machines but about people!
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Learning Agile: Understanding Scrum, XP, Lean, and Kanban
Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene
4.1
Agile revolutionized the way people think about developing software, but there are literally dozens of ways that you can "go agile." While one team may find a particular agile practice easy to use, another team may find the same practice devilishly difficult. This book demystifies agile methodologies: why they’re designed the way they are, what problems they address, and the values, principles, and ideas they embody.
Learning Agile helps you recognize the principles that apply to development problems specific to your team, company, and projects. You’ll discover how to use that information to guide your choice of methodologies and practices.
With this book you’ll learn:
Values that effective software teams possess The methodologies that embody those values The practices that make up those methodologies And principles that help you bring those values, methodologies, and practices to your team and your company
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65
The Innovator's Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work
Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson, Joseph V. Sinfield, Elizabeth J. Altman
4.1
More than a decade ago, Clayton Christensen's breakthrough book The Innovator's Dilemma illustrated how disruptive innovations drive industry transformation and market creation. Christensen's research demonstrated how growth-seeking incumbents must develop the capability to deflect disruptive attacks and seize disruptive opportunities.
In The Innovator's Guide to Growth, Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield, and Elizabeth Altman take the subject to the next level: implementation. The authors explain how to create this crucial capability for unlocking disruption's transformational power.
With a foreword by Christensen, this book provides a set of market-proven tools and approaches to innovation that have been honed through fieldwork with innovative companies like Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Intel, Motorola, SAP, and Cisco Systems. The book shows you how to:
Follow a market-proven process -- so your company can reliably create blockbuster businesses Create structures, systems, and metrics -- so the disruptive innovations that will power your firm's future growth receive the funding and personnel needed to succeed Create a common language of disruptive innovation -- so managers can reach consensus around counterintuitive courses of action
Incisive and practical, this book helps your company take the steps necessary to benefit from disruption -- instead of being eclipsed by it.
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66
Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model
John Mullins and Randy Komisa
4.1
You have a new venture in mind. And you've crafted a business plan so detailed it's a work of art. Don't get too attached to it.
As John Mullins and Randy Komisar explain in Getting to Plan B, new businesses are fraught with uncertainty. To succeed, you must change the plan in real time as the inevitable challenges arise. In fact, studies show that entrepreneurs who stick slavishly to their Plan A stand a greater chance of failing-and that many successful businesses barely resemble their founders' original idea.
The authors provide a rigorous process for stress testing your Plan A and determining how to alter it so your business makes money, solves customers' needs, and endures. You'll discover strategies for:
-Identifying the leap-of-faith assumptions hidden in your plan
-Testing those assumptions and unearthing why the plan might not work
-Reconfiguring the five components of your business model-revenue model, gross margin model, operating model, working capital model, and investment model-to create a sounder Plan B.
Filled with success stories and cautionary tales, this book offers real cases illustrating the authors' unique process. Whether your idea is for a start-up or a new business unit within your organization, Getting to Plan B contains the road map you need to reach success.
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HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands
David Cancel
4.1
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68
The Lean Practitioner's Field Book: Proven, Practical, Profitable and Powerful Techniques for Making Lean Really Work
Charles Protzman
4.1
While there are numerous Lean Certification programs, most companies have their own certification paths whereby they bestow expert status upon employees after they have participated in or led a certain number of kaizen events. Arguing that the number of kaizen events should not determine a person's expert status, The Lean Practitioner's Field Book: Proven, Practical, Profitable and Powerful Techniques for Making Lean Really Work outlines a true learning path for anyone seeking to understand essential Lean principles.
The book includes a plethora of examples drawn from the personal experiences of its many well-respected and award-winning contributors. These experts break down Lean concepts to their simplest terms to make everything as clear as possible for Lean practitioners. A refresher for some at times, the text provides thought-provoking questions with examples that will stimulate learning opportunities.
Introducing the Lean Practitioner concept, the book details the five distinct Lean Practitioner levels and includes quizzes and criteria for each level. It highlights the differences between the kaizen event approach and the Lean system level approach as well as the difference between station balancing and baton zone.
This book takes readers on a journey that begins with an overview of Lean principles and culminates with readers developing professionally through the practice of self-reliance. Providing you with the tools to implement Lean tools in your organization, the book includes discussions and examples that demonstrate how to transition from traditional accounting methods to a Lean accounting system.
The book outlines an integrated, structured approach identified by the acronym BASICS (baseline, analyze, suggest solutions, implement, check, and sustain), which is combined with a proven business strategy to help ensure a successful and sustainable transformation of your organization.
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69
HBR's 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Startups (featuring Bonus Article “Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything” by Steve Blank)
Harvard Business Review
4.1
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70
The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor
4.1
It seems, at first glance, like an obvious step to take to improve industrial productivity: one should simply watch workers at work in order to learn how they actually do their jobs. But American engineer FREDERICK WINSLOW TAYLOR (1856-1915) broke new ground with this 1919 essay, in which he applied the rigors of scientific observation to such labor as shoveling and bricklayer in order to streamline their work... and bring a sense of logic and practicality to the management of that work. This highly influential book, must-reading for anyone seeking to understand modern management practices, puts lie to such misconceptions that making industrial processes more efficient increases unemployment and that shorter workdays decrease productivity. And it laid the foundations for the discipline of management to be studied, taught, and applied with methodical precision.
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71
Lean Six SIGMA for Dummies
John Morgan and Martin Brenig-Jones
4.1
Maximise the quality and efficiency of your organisation with Lean Six Sigma
Are you looking to make your organisation more effective and productive? If you answered "yes," you need to change the way it thinks. Combining the leading improvement methods of Six Sigma and Lean, this winning technique drives performance to the next level and this friendly and accessible guide shows you how. The third edition of Lean Six Sigma For Dummies outlines the key concepts of this strategy and explains how you can use it to get the very best out of your team and your business.
The jargon-crowded language and theory of Lean Six Sigma can be intimidating for both beginners and experienced users. Written in plain English and packed with lots of helpful examples, this easy-to-follow guide arms you with tools and techniques for implementing Lean Six Sigma and offers guidance on everything from policy deployment to managing change in your organisation and everything in between.
- Gives you plain-English explanations of complicated jargon - Serves as a useful tool for businesspeople looking to make their organisation more effective - Helps you achieve goals with ease and confidence - Provides useful hands-on checklists
Whether you want to manage a project more tightly or fine-tune existing systems and processes, the third edition of Lean Six Sigma For Dummies makes it easier to achieve your business goals.
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72
Edge: Value-Driven Digital Transformation
Jim Highsmith
4.1
Today's enterprises are achieving incremental outcomes in a world of exponential opportunities. Why are their digital transformations falling short? Poor execution: enterprise capabilities are proving inadequate in areas ranging from portfolio management to software delivery. Now, ThoughtWorks' pioneering digital transformation experts introduce EDGE: a powerful new operating model that closes the gap between digital strategy and execution, so you can truly achieve continuous innovation. Fast, iterative, adaptive, lightweight, and value driven, EDGE addresses three crucial issues: How people work together when major, fast-paced responses are necessary How organizations allocate and monitor investment funds for initiatives based on their vision and goals How organizations learn to adapt fast enough to thrive Agile leader Jim Highsmith and his colleagues explain how EDGE embraces an adaptive mindset in the face of market uncertainty, a Lean Value Tree that encourages value linkage from vision to detailed initiatives, incremental rather than big upfront funding, and a focus on collaborative decision-making rather than artifacts and burdensome processes. Next, they illuminate EDGE's emphasis on managing change and transforming organizations by adjusting investment to reflect new strategies and reduce risk. You'll gain practical insight for leveraging EDGE in your organization, drawing on the unmatched experience of its creators and their pioneering clients.
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How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement: A Primer for Becoming the Best in the World
Joakim Ahlstrom
4.1
Your organizational transformation begins here! Comprehensive, detailed, and easy to read and understand, How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement takes you through a real-life case study of one organization's journey to a world-class continuous improvement process.
Joakim Ahlstrom--one of the world's most respected continuous improvement experts--serves as your coach. He first helps you decide whether you want to embark on the continuous improvement journey and takes you through the entire process step by step, all the way through generating remarkable business results with his unique methods.
In each chapter, Ahlstrom describes a specific stage of the transformation story and provides a clear analysis of each one to help you apply his methods in your own company. In no time you'll grasp all the concepts you need to know. How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement covers it all, including:
How to shift mindsets and behaviors using the often neglected practice of coaching Common pitfalls to help you plan out how you will apply the principles and practices Using "six-legged spiders" and "fishy" diagrams to achieve measurable results Ways to avoid "Watermelon" key performance indicators that often mask the truth Ahlstrom explains rational behind all the methods in the book--the results they produce, and why--and offers practical advice on how to get full input from everyone involved. Ahlstrom concludes the book with a chapter offering a current-state analysis tool and a simple template to apply in your company.
If you're seeking to design and launch a continuous improvement program, How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement is the first book you should turn to--and it's the last one you'll ever need!
Praise for How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement
"Using a story he lived through, Joakim vividly brings to life for us the transformation from a mediocre top-down organization depending on a few internal experts for its survival to a high performance organization of empowered employees engaged in continuous improvement." -Jeffrey Liker, bestselling author of The Toyota Way
"This succinct book packs an enormous amount of wisdom and experience into an entertaining fast read. It gives a clear roadmap for any leader to implement a strong continuous improvement program in his or her unit. Highly recommended!" -Alan G. Robinson, Professor of Management, University of Massachusetts and author of Corporate Creativity and Ideas are Free
"The most valuable and lean book I have read about lean." -G�ran Martinsson, Continuous improvement Manager, IKEA
"Well written, easy to read, filled with excellent examples . . . If you only plan to read one change management book this year, this is the book you should read." -Dag N�slund, Professor of Management, University of North Florida
"An amazing guide in lean principles, with simple tools for simplifications." -Susanne Schipper, Continuous Improvement Coach, AstraZeneca
"Simplicity is the essence of this great book. Ahlstrom delivers a straightforward and simple approach to support your work with continuous improvement." -Ronny �lund, Productivity Management, Volvo CE
"This book is a little gem with large content! Unlike many other books on the subject, you only have to read it once because it sticks." -Johan Valett, Vice President Haldex Way, Haldex
"I recommend How to Succeed with Continuous Improvement to anyone who needs a fast and inspiring introduction to continuous improvement." -Janne Lundberg, Global Lean Innovation Manager, Assa Abloy
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Agile Experience Design: A Digital Designer's Guide to Agile, Lean, and Continuous
Lindsay Ratcliffe, Marc McNeill
4.0
Agile development methodologies may have started life in IT, but their widespread and continuing adoption means there are many practitioners outside of IT--including designers--who need to change their thinking and adapt their practices. This is the missing book about agile that shows how designers, product managers, and development teams can integrate experience design into lean and agile product development. It equips you with tools, techniques and a framework for designing great experiences using agile methods so you can deliver timely products that are technically feasible, profitable for the business, and desirable from an end-customer perspective. This book will help you
successfully integrate your design process on an agile project and feel like part of the agile team. do good design faster by doing just enough, just in time. use design methods from disciplines such as design thinking, customer-centered design, product design, and service design. create successful digital products by considering the needs of the end-customer, the business, and technology. understand the next wave of thinking about continuous design and continuous delivery.
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75
Clarity First: How Smart Leaders and Organizations Achieve Outstanding Performance
Karen Martin
4.0
Award-winning business performance improvement and Lean management expert Karen Martin diagnoses a ubiquitous business management and leadership problem--the lack of clarity--and outlines specific actions to dramatically improve organizational performance.
Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that "tolerance for ambiguity" has become a clich�d job requirement.
It doesn't have to be this way.
In Clarity First, Karen provides methods and insights for achieving clarity to unleash potential, innovate at higher levels, and solve the problems that matter to deliver outstanding business results. Both a visionary road map and practical guide, this book will help leaders:
-Identify and communicate the organization's true purpose
-Set achievable priorities
-Deliver greater customer value through more efficient processes
-Provide greater transparency about true versus assumed performance
-Build strong problem-solving and critical thinking capabilities throughout the organization
-Develop personal clarity to be a more direct, purposeful, and successful leader
Eliminating ambiguity is the first step for leaders and organizations to achieve strategic goals. Learn how to gain the clarity needed to make better decisions, lead more effectively, and boost organizational performance.
When it comes to leading an outstanding organization, every great leader needs Clarity First.
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76
Operations Management for Dummies
Mary Ann Anderson
4.0
Score your highest in Operations Management Operations management is an important skill for current and aspiring business leaders to develop and master. It deals with the design and management of products, processes, services, and supply chains. Operations management is a growing field and a required course for most undergraduate business majors and MBA candidates. Now, Operations Management For Dummies serves as an extremely resourceful aid for this difficult subject.
Tracks to a typical course in operations management or operations strategy, and covers topics such as evaluating and measuring existing systems' performance and efficiency, materials management and product development, using tools like Six Sigma and Lean production, designing new, improved processes, and defining, planning, and controlling costs of projects.
Clearly organizes and explains complex topics Serves as an supplement to your Operations Management textbooks Helps you score your highest in your Operations Management course Whether your aim is to earn an undergraduate degree in business or an MBA, Operations Management For Dummies is indispensable supplemental reading for your operations management course.
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77
How To Launch a Startup: An easy to understand 9-step guide to make your startup idea a real business
Milan Steskal, Alexandra Steskal, Angela Ash
4.0
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78
The Design Thinking Playbook: Mindful Digital Transformation of Teams, Products, Services, Businesses and Ecosystems
Michael Lewrick, Patrick Link, et al.
4.0
A radical shift in perspective to transform your organization to become more innovative
The Design Thinking Playbook is an actionable guide to the future of business. By stepping back and questioning the current mindset, the faults of the status quo stand out in stark relief--and this guide gives you the tools and frameworks you need to kick off a digital transformation. Design Thinking is about approaching things differently with a strong user orientation and fast iterations with multidisciplinary teams to solve wicked problems. It is equally applicable to (re-)design products, services, processes, business models, and ecosystems. It inspires radical innovation as a matter of course, and ignites capabilities beyond mere potential. Unmatched as a source of competitive advantage, Design Thinking is the driving force behind those who will lead industries through transformations and evolutions.
This book describes how Design Thinking is applied across a variety of industries, enriched with other proven approaches as well as the necessary tools, and the knowledge to use them effectively. Packed with solutions for common challenges including digital transformation, this practical, highly visual discussion shows you how Design Thinking fits into agile methods within management, innovation, and startups.
Explore the digitized future using new design criteria to create real value for the user Foster radical innovation through an inspiring framework for action Gather the right people to build highly-motivated teams Apply Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, Big Data Analytics, and Lean Start-up using new tools and a fresh new perspective Create Minimum Viable Ecosystems (MVEs) for digital processes and services which becomes for example essential in building Blockchain applications Practical frameworks, real-world solutions, and radical innovation wrapped in a whole new outlook give you the power to mindfully lead to new heights. From systems and operations to people, projects, culture, digitalization, and beyond, this invaluable mind shift paves the way for organizations--and individuals--to do great things. When you're ready to give your organization a big step forward, The Design Thinking Playbook is your practical guide to a more innovative future.
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79
The Product Manager's Survival Guide, Second Edition: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed as a Product Manager
Steven Haines
4.0
Advance in your product management career and create innovative products that customers love!
Regardless of industry or sector, to compete in today's business world, product managers must understand how their customer's preferences change, how technology evolves, and how anticipate what competitors might do. Regardless of industry, you need a reliable resource that provides timely guidance and practical tools to help you compete. With new content and expert advice, this updated edition of The Product Manager's Survival Guide brings you fully up to date on what you need to succeed as a product manager.
For your professional future, you'll learn it's not the development technique that will help you get ahead, it's how you think like a strategically minded business person. Your continuous learning starts with your product management acumen assessment, and takes root, when you develop your own professional development strategy.
The Product Manager's Survival Guide, Second Edition features brand new material, including:
- A product management acumen assessment - Action planning ideas at the end of each chapter - Techniques to earn empowerment - Tools to develop product strategies and roadmaps - Methods to deploy and release products - Metrics to assess product performance
Simple and easy to understand, this invaluable guide will help you bring your company into the digital age and continue to evolve with changing times.
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80
The Innovator's Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas
Michael Schrage
4.0
Achieving faster, better, cheaper, and more creative innovation outcomes with the 5X5 framework: 5 people, 5 days, 5 experiments, $5,000, and 5 weeks.
What is the best way for a company to innovate? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. The Innovator's Hypothesis addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively--and competitively--crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces the 5x5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.
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81
The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence: A Lean Leader's Guide to Achieving and Sustaining Excellence
Larry E. Fast
4.0
Following in the tradition of its bestselling predecessor, The 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence: A Lean Leader's Guide to Achieving and Sustaining Excellence, Second Edition outlines a comprehensive, proven process for delivering world-class performance while also cultivating the right culture through leadership, mentoring, and hourly associate involvement.
While most books on continuous improvement focus on specific tools and methods, this book details a top-down strategy and process that Lean leaders can use to implement and sustain manufacturing excellence. It outlines a clear pathway to excellence via the 12 Principles of Manufacturing Excellence and provides a method for tracking progress--plant by plant and function by function.
This updated edition includes a new chapter on real stories about poor leadership at the top. Also featured are new and updated figures and exhibits. It contains chapters devoted to each principle of manufacturing excellence along with a chapter on each leader's role. Illustrating the importance of using Lean and Six Sigma tools to improve your business, the book:
Details a comprehensive approach for achieving and sustaining excellence--from board room strategy to shop floor execution Integrates strategy and leadership development Paves a path for culture change that prepares hourly employees to take control of their processes and prepares management to enable them to do it Details an audit process for identifying priorities for improvement and tracking progress and ensuring sustainability
Tapping into more than four decades of leadership experience, 35 years of it in the manufacturing industry, Larry Fast explains how to achieve both vertical and horizontal alignment across your organization. Like the previous edition, the book includes a CD with color versions of the images in the book, a manufacturing excellence reading list, and formulas for selected metrics.
The CD also includes a sample manufacturing excellence audit (a powerful tool to achieve and sustain the journey), a sample communications plan, a sample communications plan calendar, a sample training plan, and a new Project Prioritization worksheet--all of which can be easily customized to meet your organization's specific needs.
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82
People Over Process: Leadership for Agility
Michael K Levine
4.0
This book helps participants in agile software development environments learn to become leaders. Facilitative leaders should be at every level of the organization, from individual contributor to informal team leader to managers of all stripes -- it takes much focus and intentionality from senior organizational leaders, who have special obligations in creating successful lean and agile development environments. But, beyond the principles of facilitative leadership for agility, People over Process provides tips and demonstrative scenes for the more important and common software meetings: architecture simulations, project planning, team configurations, retrospectives, and more. The author fully illustrates the principles and shares proven techniques for the most important leadership events in agile projects.
While this book focuses on facilitating extraordinarily well-prepared meetings, it serves as a metaphor for leadership more broadly. The leader's obligation to help their team make rigorous fact-based decisions; to gain broad input and have participants aligned on the outcomes and next steps; and to do so in an efficient way that respects the time of the participants is as relevant to every-day leadership activity as it is to conducting meetings.
The author mixes background and explanation with demonstration -- in this case, the story of an agile project at the fictitious Pacifica Bank. The scenario constructed at Pacifica illustrates the concepts of effective leadership and productive workplace environments. The book concentrates on the flow of software from understanding what is needed through design, development, testing, and deployment.
Essentially, the author provides a simple and powerful model of leadership, examples, and tips. This is not a cookbook on how to lead -- It is a set of principles and examples. All leaders must find their own way for their team, their organization, and their unique challenges.
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83
Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation
George Koenigsaecker
4.0
Updated with new information, illustrations, and leadership tools, Leading the Lean Enterprise Transformation, Second Edition describes how the metrics used by Toyota drive every line item in a financial statement in the right direction. Rather than focus on Lean tools and principles, the new edition of this bestselling reference focuses on what may be the least understood and most critical aspect of a Lean transformation: the building of a Lean culture. In addition to new appendices with background information and insightful stories on Lean leadership and implementation, it includes new information on tactical organization practices, strategy deployment, and Lean culture.
An inductee to IndustryWeek's Hall of Fame, George Koenigsaecker illustrates successful strategies and valuable lessons learned with case histories of U.S. leaders who have been instrumental in bringing Lean to the forefront. He explains the use of value stream analysis at the leadership level and describes how to structure kaizen events that can improve the value stream. Organized in the chronological sequence that a leader embarking on a Lean journey would experience, the book discusses the methods used by the author during the Hon Company's successful Lean conversion, which doubled productivity, tripled revenues, and led IndustryWeek to recognize Hon as one of the "World's 100 Best Managed Firms."
The book not only introduces powerful leadership tools--including strategy deployment, transformation value stream analysis, and transformation plan of care--but also arms potential change agents with the soft skills needed to define, develop, and communicate their vision. Detailing the steps required to sustain improvements, it supplies time-tested guidance for effective leadership throughout a Lean transformation in any organization.
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84
Beyond The Prototype: A roadmap for navigating the fuzzy area between ideas and outcomes.
Douglas Ferguson
4.0
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85
Lean Strategy
Michael Balle, Daniel Jones, Jacques Chaize, Orest Fiume
4.0
A groundbreaking and revolutionary book that will transform how lean is understood, practiced, and used within organizations
A lean strategy is about gaining a competitive edge by offering better quality products at competitive prices and making a sustainable profit by eliminating waste through engaging employees in discovering deeper ways to think about their own jobs and smarter ways of working together. In its current form, lean has been radically effective, but its true powers have yet to be harnessed.
Lean Strategy harnesses that power and delivers a new way of creating value from lean. Leading lean experts address popular misconceptions about the basics of lean/TPS, showing the true purpose of tools, methods, and attitudes that leverage the intelligence of every employee doing the work. You'll learn how to think--and then act--differently, tapping the power of every person in your organization in a disciplined manner that generates unparalleled, sustainable success that is responsive to today's most pressing challenges
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86
Lean Mobile App Development: Apply Lean startup methodologies to develop successful iOS and Android apps
Mike van Drongelen, Adam Dennis, et al.
4.0
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87
Essentials of Supply Chain Management
Michael H. Hugos
4.0
The bestselling guide to the field, updated with the latest innovations
Essentials of Supply Chain Management is the definitive guide to the field, providing both broad coverage and necessary detail from a practical, real-world perspective. From clear explanation of fundamental concepts to insightful discussion of supply chain innovation, this book offers students and professionals a comprehensive introduction with immediately-applicable understanding. The fourth edition has been updated to reflect the current state of the field, with coverage of the latest technologies and new case studies that illustrate critical concepts in action. Organized for easy navigation and ease-of-use, this invaluable guide also serves as a quick reference for managers in the field seeking tips and techniques for maximizing efficiency and turning the supply chain into a source of competitive advantage.
The supply chain underpins the entire structure of manufacturing and retailing. Well-run, it can help a company become a global behemoth--or, if poorly-managed, it can sink a company before the product ever sees the light of day. The supply chain involves many moving parts, constantly-changing variables, and a network of other business that may have different priorities and interests--keeping it all running smoothly is a complex, but immensely powerful skill. This book takes you inside the supply chain to show you what you need to know.
Understand the fundamental concepts behind supply chain management Learn how supply chains work, and how to measure their performance Explore the ways in which innovation is improving supply chains around the world Examine the supply chain as a source of competitive advantage Whether you're at the front or the back of your supply chain, your business is affected by every other company and event in the chain. Deep understanding and a host of practical skills are required to accurately predict, react to, and manage the ever-changing stream of events that could potentially disrupt the flow. Essentials of Supply Chain Management prepares you to take on the challenge and succeed.
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88
Fail Fast or Win Big: The Start-Up Plan for Starting Now
Bernhard Schroeder
4.0
Entrepreneurs have long been taught that to be successful, they need to spend months perfecting a business plan and finding investors before they can finally launch their business. But with the marketplace changing at lightning speed, this notion is not only outdated--it's costly.
There's no point to building a business in a bubble. Today's entrepreneurs must embrace the idea of "failing fast." They need to connect with real customers and determine quickly whether their idea is worth pursuing, needs new direction, or should be abandoned altogether. Fail Fast or Win Big shows entrepreneurs how to:
• Create a rapid prototype of their product or service • Develop a business model instead of a business plan • Test it repeatedly with customers so they can spot failure early • Continue to refine the model based on customer interactions • Leverage their network and resources in order to run lean
The longer it takes to launch a company, the more changes there will have been in the market place. Featuring real-life examples of entrepreneurs who set out to fail fast and ended up winning big, this ground breaking guide reveals how the right kind of risk can really pay off.
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89
Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management
Paul Myerson
4.0
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.
Expert Strategies for Improving Supply Chain and Logistics Performance Using LeanThis practical guide reveals how to identify and eliminate waste in your organization's supply chain and logistics function. Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management provides explanations of both basic and advanced Lean tools, as well as specific Lean implementation opportunities. The book then describes a Lean implementation methodology with critical success factors. Real-world examples and case studies demonstrate how to effectively use this powerful strategy to realize significant, long-term improvements and bottom-line savings.
COVERAGE INCLUDES: * Using Lean to energize your supply chain • The eight wastes • Lean opportunities and JIT in supply chain and logistics • Lean tools and warehouse • Global lean supply chain and logistics • Lean opportunity assessment, value stream mapping, and Kaizen event management • Best-in-class use of technology with Lean • Metrics and measurement • Education and training
Valuable training slides are available for download.
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90
The Lean Six SIGMA Black Belt Handbook: Tools and Methods for Process Acceleration
Frank Voehl
4.0
Although Lean and Six Sigma appear to be quite different, when used together they have shown to deliver unprecedented improvements to quality and profitability. The Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Handbook: Tools and Methods for Process Acceleration explains how to integrate these seemingly dissimilar approaches to increase production speed while decreasing variations and costs in your organization.
Presenting problem-solving tools you can use to immediately determine the sources of the problems in your organization, the book is based on a recent survey that analyzed Six Sigma tools to determine which are the most beneficial. Although it focuses on the most commonly used tools, it also includes coverage of those used a minimum of two times on every five Six Sigma projects.
Filled with diagrams of the tools you'll need, the book supplies a comprehensive framework to help you for organize and process the vast amount of information currently available about Lean, quality management, and continuous improvement process applications. It begins with an overview of Six Sigma, followed by little-known tips for using Lean Six Sigma (LSS) effectively. It examines the LSS quality system, its supporting organization, and the different roles involved.
Identifying the theories required to support a contemporary Lean system, the book describes the new skills and technologies that you need to master to be certified at the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt (LSSBB) level. It also covers the advanced non-statistical and statistical tools that are new to the LSSBB body of knowledge.
Presenting time-tested insights of a distinguished group of authors, the book provides the understanding required to select the solutions that best fit your organization's aim and culture. It also includes exercises, worksheets, and templates you can easily customize to create your own handbook for continuous process improvement.
Designed to make the methodologies you choose easy to follow, the book will help Black Belts and Senseis better engage their employees, as well as provide an integrated and visual process management structure for reporting and sustaining continuous improvement breakthroughs and initiatives.
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91
Lean Branding: Creating Dynamic Brands to Generate Conversion
Laura Busche
4.0
Every day, thousands of passionate developers come up with new startup ideas but lack the branding know-how to make them thrive. If you count yourself among them, Lean Branding is here to help.
This practical toolkit helps you build your own robust, dynamic brands that generate conversion. You'll find over 100 DIY branding tactics and inspiring case studies, and step-by-step instructions for building and measuring 25 essential brand strategy ingredients, from logo design to demo-day pitches, using The Lean Startup methodology's Build-Measure-Learn loop.
Learn exactly what a brand is--and what it isn't Build a minimal set of brand ingredients that are viable in the marketplace: brand story, brand symbols, and brand strategy Measure your brand ingredients by using meaningful metrics to see if they meet your conversion goals Pivot your brand ingredients in new directions based on what you've learned--by optimizing rather than trashing Focus specifically on brand story, symbols, or strategy by following the Build-Measure-Learn chapters that apply
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92
The Service Startup: Design Thinking gets Lean
Tenny Pinheiro, Joel Stein, Lucas Toledo
4.0
A practical guide to integrate Service Design Thinking and Lean Startup in the service era.
"Pinheiro will inspire you to think differently about business, design, education, and - perhaps most importantly - the way you work every day." - Kerry Bodine, co-author of Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business
"In this book, Tenny offers some extremely valid and hard-hitting criticism regarding the ideals surrounding the dictate of building a Minimum Viable Product. Agreed on many fronts but I found his reinvention of these principles when applied to the service industry to be extremely insightful. The concept of a Minimum Valuable Service is unique, new and sets goals intended to deliver maximum value with measurable results. This is a must read for anyone in the global innovation economy." - Rick Rasmussen, NestGSV. International Business development.
This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no Design degrees, can integrate Service Design into their development cycles in order to create sustainable, desirable and profitable new services. In the first part, Tenny explores the reasons why startups need to move away from the "make and sell" industrial logic we've been exploiting over the last century. To take its place he proposes a new service oriented mindset that carries the idea of "learn, use and remember" users' journeys. He also discusses the challenges our industrial society is facing and how the combination of design with a service oriented mentality can be key to help new and existent businesses make this shift. In the second part, he will take you on a journey through the MVS - Minimum Valuable Service - model. This model can seamlessly integrate Service Design into the Lean Startup or any Agile development cycle. It adds the human values needed to foster service innovations within the Lean's scientific approach. In this part of the book you will learn tools, methods and practices that will help you get your hands dirty with design.
At some point every adventure requires a great guide, and this journey into the heart of the new is led impeccably by Tenny Pinheiro. Slyly sidestepping the pitfalls of the Lean Startup approach, he skillfully navigates us through to a deeper understanding of the forces shaping the evolving service economy. By trusting the wisdom of the many to help design the next phase of business, his approach taps into an inexhaustible source of creativity and innovation. The Service Startup is a trusty roadmap that you will long keep by your side. As Tenny might suggest: learn it, use it, and remember it. - Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design. Director for the graduate Program in Transdisciplinary Design.
"I'll admit it: I enjoy seeing someone who knows their stuff re-assemble and improve on the work of an adjacent profession. Tenny calls out what's lacking in the Lean Startup approach, in the most thorough and insightful ways. In the spirit of iteration, he's taken an existing approach and improved on it. If only all criticism were this good. I enjoyed his delightfully nuanced views on the world of services - how they're perceived, experienced, and remembered - as well as his historical perspectives on the worlds of design, business and marketing. Opinionated but also well-informed, this is a pragmatic, human-centric take on designing and delivering services that I'd recommend to anyone whose work affects other people. - Chad Thornton, Experience Designer, Airbnb"
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93
Experiencia de usuario para lean startups: cómo investigar y diseñar con mayor inteligencia y rapidez
Laura Klein and Javier López Manzano
4.0
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94
Pull Production for the Shopfloor
Productivity Press Development Team…
4.0
In a "pull" production system, the final process pulls needed parts from the previous process, which pulls from the process before it, and so on, as determined by customer demand. This allows you to operate without preset schedules and avoid unnecessary costs, wastes, and delays on the manufacturing floor.Pull Production for the Shopfloor introduces production teams and managers to basic pull production concepts, enabling them to begin understanding, planning, and implementing this lean tool. Use this book to get everyone on board to reduce work in process inventory, lead-time, and other profit-draining expenses. This book will enable plant managers to explain and thereby get support the support they need from higher management for their pull implementation efforts.
In this book you will learn about:
Key concepts and applications of pull production The five steps to implementing a pull production system Production leveling Line balancing Managing pull production with kanban One-piece flow production Linking your suppliers to your pull production systemProductivity's Shopfloor Series books offer a simple, cost-effective approach for building basic knowledge about key manufacturing improvement topics. Like all our Shopfloor Series books, Pull Production for the Shopfloor includes innovative instructional features that are the signature of the Shopfloor Series. The goal: to place powerful and proven improvement tools such as pull production techniques in the hands of your entire workforce.
Key learning features include:
Well-organized, and easy-to-assimilate learning Chapter overviews and summaries Questions throughout each chapter to help you apply the learning to your own workplace Drawings and illustrations Margin icons that flag definitions, main points, and other highlights
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95
The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck: Practical Tips and Tricks for Launching and Operating SAFe Agile Release Trains
Em Campbell-Pretty
4.0
In The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck, Em and Adrienne share their "trade secrets" for launching and operating powerful and effective Agile Release Trains. There's a lot at stake when launching an Agile Release Train. When taking on an Enterprise Lean-Agile Transformation you only get one shot at a first impression. Runaway trains are expensive. Money gets wasted, time gets lost and the reputational damage can take years to repair.Going well beyond the standard SAFe training, this book deep dives into the practical tips and tricks that only over 15 years of combined real world experience can teach. Peppered with innumerable war stories, this book provides plenty of entertainment (as well as education) in the form of personal anecdotes, cautionary tales and pro-tips for both the colocated Agile Release Train and its more complicated globally distributed cousins.You will learn how to get a ticket on the SAFe railway, load the cargo on your train, set the timetable, SAFely board and stay on the tracks. No matter your context, you are sure to find plenty of actionable ideas for launching and operating Agile Release Trains. Let's face it, any train can derail, so let The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck be the coach in your pocket, warning you of the obstacles on the tracks ahead before you train wreck.
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96
Lean Startup: How to Apply the Lean Startup Methodology to Innovate, Accelerate, and Create Successful Businesses (Lean Guides with Scrum, Sprint, Kanban, DSDM, XP & Crystal Book 4)
Greg Caldwell
4.0
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97
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 general overview of Lean, how flow and the value stream works, and the best ways to apply Lean to your enterprise.
This revised edition includes the latest tools, advice, and information that can be used by everyone -- from major corporations to small business, from non-profits and hospitals to manufacturers and service corporations. In addition, it takes a look at the successes and failures of earlier Lean pioneers -- including Toyota, the inventors of Lean -- and offer case studies and hands-on advice.The latest on the Six Sigma and Lean movementsThe role of technology and the expanding Lean toolboxCase studies enhance the material
"Lean For Dummies" gives today's business owners and upper level management in companies of all sizes and in all industries, the tools and information they need to streamline process and operate more efficiently.
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98
What Is Lean Six SIGMA
Michael L. George
4.0
A quick introduction on how to use Lean Six Sigma to improve your workplace, meet your goals, and better serve your customers.
Lean Six Sigma combines the two most important improvement trends of our time: making work better (using Six Sigma) and making work faster (using Lean principles). In this plain-English guide, you'll discover how this remarkable quality improvement method can give you the tools to identify and eliminate waste and quality problems in your own work area.
Packed with diagrams, cartoons, and real-life examples, What is Lean Six Sigma? reveals the "four keys" of Lean Six Sigma and how they apply to your own job:
Delight your customers with speed and quality Improve your processes Work together for maximum gain Base decisions on data and facts You'll see the big picture of what your company hopes to gain with Lean Six Sigma, how it may affect your work area, and what it can mean to you personally.
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99
Lean Office and Service Simplified: The Definitive How-To Guide
Drew Locher
4.0
Winner of a 2012 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award Demystifying the application of Lean methods, Lean Office and Service Simplified: The Definitive How-To Guide goes beyond the basic tools to detail the key concepts of Lean as they apply to office and service environments. It begins by discussing value stream management, followed by chapters on standard work, flow, level pull, and visual management.
Winner of a 2012 Shingo Prize, this book covers essential Lean tools, including 5S and mistake proofing. It breaks down Lean concepts into their elementary components, describes them in a nonmanufacturing context, and supplies readers with specific how-to methodologies. Providing detailed examples throughout, the text illustrates the functions found in most service organizations, as well as the administrative areas of manufacturing companies.
Drawing on more than two decades of practical experience, the author provides implementation strategies on a function-by-function and department-by-department basis. He examines the most common obstacles that readers are likely to encounter and supplies strategies to address those obstacles. The text includes a toolbox of helpful forms, charts, checklists, templates, and worksheets to help kick-start your Lean implementation efforts. Watch Shingo Prize-winning author Drew Locher discuss how to implement Lean concepts into your office and service settings.
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Managerial Accounting
Carl S. Warren
4.0
Warren/Reeve/Duchac�s MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING 14E provides the foundation in managerial accounting fundamentals that you need to succeed by clearly showing how accounting is important to business. Business examples and a unique chapter schema provide context for readers, demonstrating how each chapter�s content fits into the big picture, connecting fundamental concepts with real businesses. Additionally, MANAGERIAL ACCOUNTING 14E and CENGAGENOWv2� provide students with a range of activities that address each stage of the learning process from motivation to mastery.