All in book review
Blue Ocean Strategy is a ten-year-old book that is still relevant today. How do you craft a business strategy that moves you to a new mode of operation - away from the competition and setting your own destiny? I also see a lot of Viable Vision in this book.
I read the 20-year-old Raving Fans recently. It has some great ideas that help people think about how to grow and develop your business. The key is to turn your customers into raving fans.
Another book on my December reading binge was Look Before You Lean by “Employee X.” It was recommended by my friend and fellow curious cat, Steve Holt, in a quick Tweet. I took a look, and the topic seemed right up my alley. Indeed it is.
Eli Goldratt’s Critical Chain is another of his business novels, published in 1997 - about 10 years after The Goal. I have read the book previously, but apparently it has been much longer than I realized. There were elements here that I didn’t remember at all - most of the story line in fact.
After the TOC ICO conference, I picked up Yuji Kishira's Wa - Transformation Management by Harmony, based on a conversation with him and other attendees. It is a fun take on Theory of Constraints, change management and other topics.
My review of "The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win" by Gene Kim and gang. I enjoyed it, and ended up staying up late to finish it. The structure of the book is quite familiar: business novel; looming disaster; averted with the determination of the protagonist (and colleagues) and the help of a wacky "guru." There are some new-to-me concepts that fit neatly with my current worldview.
I re-read Eli Goldratt's The Goal. I enjoyed reading it again for the nuggets embedded throughout and the reminder that this is a solid way to help people and organizations think differently about their situation.
I've had the Stop Starting, Start Finishing brochure / comic from Arne Rock and his team sitting in my briefcase ever since the Lean Kanban conference last spring. It's a fun read about how Justin (Time) does a Kanban implementation.
I read Bob Sproull's _Epiphanized_ in just a few days and found it told a gripping story of TOC transformation, even if the writing style was sometimes off-putting.
Thomas Corbett's _Throughput Accounting_ is a quick read and very familiar for someone who has been in the Theory of Constraints world. I wonder if anyone comes to TOC via this route, rather than through The Goal and some of the other business novels.
This book is a collection of 122 management f/laws described by Ackoff and compiled and updated by Herbert Addison. Good fun.
I just finished reading David Byrne's somewhat autobiographical research, How Music Works. I found Talking Heads and some of his other projects playing on the stereo much more frequently than usual.
The latest read from my backlog is David Anderson's 2004 look at "Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results." It's a great combination of two of my interest areas today.
I breezed through Jim Benson's short and informative Why Plans Fail: Cognitive Bias, Decision Making, and Your Business. As you can see from the subtitle, it isn't about blaming someone else for why plans fail. It's about helping us see how our own thinking gets us in this mess.
To create change we have to move people to a new way of acting with each other (behaviors). The concept behind Viral Change is to make those behaviors infection: spread, copy, reinforce, and spread more.
Christopher Avery's "Teamwork is an Individual Skill" may be ten years old, but it is a great resource. The short summary: I am responsible for the success of any venture in which I choose to participate
Review of Eric Von Hippel's "Democratizing Innovation" which looks at the spread of user-inspired and user-created innovations throughout all industries. What creates it? What sustains it?