Category: Reviews
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Book Review: The Future of Work
Thomas W. Malone compares in The Future of Work centralized hierarchies, loose hierarchies, democracies and free markets from a business perspective. Tomas describes how the “new order of business” will shape organizations, management and our lives. His basic tenet is that decreasing communication costs influences/enables/drives organizational decentralization. The conclusion is that to be an effective manager it…
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Book Review: Kanban
Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business by David J. Anderson is recommended reading if you are interested in evolutionary improvement of software development. Part 1 of the book gives an introduction to Kanban. Part 2 explains the fundamentals such as limiting work in progress and continuous improvements. Part 3 goes in depth with…
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Book Review: Toyota Kata
Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results by Mike Rother is a very interesting book. What I find particularly interesting is the view that an organization’s processes and practices are an outcome of people’s thinking and behavior. The traditional view is that you can control human behavior by defining the processes and…
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Book Review: Beyond Budgeting
Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap by Jeremy Hope is about how to break free from the yearly budgeting process. Jeremy makes a strong case for decentralization in business. One of the most notable examples in the book is Svenska Handelsbanken (SHB) which moved beyond budgeting and the fixed…
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Book Review: Future Search
Future Search by Marvin Weisbord & Sandra Janoff is a planning meeting setup involving the whole system. It has been in use since the early 1980s. I find the approach interesting since it flattens hierarchies, broaden the lines of communication, and encourages a dialogue born from the deep knowledge in each person in the system. The…
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Book Review: How to Change the World
How to Change the World: Change Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo is a small book (70 pages) which is easy to read. The core of the book is a combination of a number of ideas into a superidea, or as the author calls it, a supermodel. There are a few words of wisdom, but overall…