I was revisiting an old favorite of mine last night, "The Great Game of
Business" by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham, and thought it worth
mentioning as well. The book is really written more for the manager
point of view and focuses more on how to decrease costs and increase
production in a manufacturing (actually re-manufacturing in this case)
plant, but it is another one of those ones to help you really understand
why you need to know every part of the business. There is a lot of
tongue-in-cheek which makes it a fairly fun read.
The book is the story of how Jack and a number of other managers bought
Springfield Remanufacturing when International Harvester was planning to
get rid of it during the '80s recession and what they did to make it
successful. They were one of the early adopters of the concept known as
Open Book Management. OBM underlying strategy is that people do better
(and companies do better) when they have a full understanding of the
business and where they fit into it (and how their actions affect others
and vice versa) instead of just the information they need to do their
job. OBM works very nicely along side agile and lean DevOps.
There are some activities they did that sound crazy, they tasked a
manager to find out why they used so much toilet paper and was that an
appropriate amount. However, if you start to think about why the did it
and the results they found, as opposed to thinking of the "easy" answers
(using cheaper toilet paper, setting limits, making people bring their
own, etc), you can start to understand how those same concepts are
related to other situations (before you laugh at things like bring your
own toilet paper; how many of us provide some or all of our own tools as
a cost savings measure).
-spp
On 6/23/2015 12:08 PM, Matt Lawrence wrote:
I have recently read "Toyota Kata" and "The Open Organization".
Recommended.
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