Industrial

The Toyota Way Fieldbook

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.

The Breakthrough Company: How Everyday Companies Become Extraordinary Performers

The vast majority of small businesses stay small—and not by choice. Only the most savvy and persistent—a tiny one tenth of one percent—break through to annual sales above $250 million. In The Breakthrough Company, Keith McFarland pinpoints how everyday companies become extraordinary, showing that luck is a negligible factor. Rather, breakthrough success turns out to be associated with a clearly identifiable set of strategies and skills that anyone in any business can emulate—from small startup to industry leader.

Encouraged by experts such as business legend Peter Drucker and Good to Great author Jim Collins to identify the drivers that enable a company to push past the entrepreneurial phase, McFarland spent five years building and analyzing the world’s largest growth-company performance database and interviewing more than 1,500 growth-company executives on four continents. His goal was simple: to identify the secrets of breakthrough.

The Breakthrough Company is the result. Winnowing a study pool of more than 7,000 companies down to nine that have made the transition to major-player status, McFarland highlights real-world tools and myth-busting insights that can be used by anyone wanting his or her business to join this exclusive circle. Among the book’s takeaways:

• Common wisdom holds that the founders and core entrepreneurial leaders of a company must step aside for the business to reach the next level. Not true—as long as founders “crown the company” instead of themselves.
• It’s not reckless to make ever-escalating bets on your company’s future, even going nose to nose with competitors many times your size. In fact, it turns out that the only safety comes in constantly upping the ante in exactly this way.
• A Business Bermuda Triangle does exist, gobbling up companies on the verge of breakthrough. Presented here are three ways to navigate this potentially deadly hazard successfully.
• However good you are—or think you are—you can’t do it alone. Learn how to surround your company with networks of outside resources, aka “scaffolding,” and how to enlist the aid of “insultants”—people who are willing to question a firm’s existing assumptions and ways of doing business.

With powerful and specific action steps concluding each chapter—and invaluable advice on virtually every page from business leaders who’ve taken their companies to extraordinary levels of growth and profitability—The Breakthrough Company is one of the most provocative, inspiring, and instructive business books you’ll ever read.

Asking: A 59-Minute Guide to Everything Board Members, Volunteers, and Staff Must Know to Secure the Gift

It ranks right up there with public speaking. Nearly all of us fear it. And yet it's critical to our success. Asking for money. It makes even the stout-hearted quiver.

But now comes a book, Asking: A 59-Minute Guide to Everything Board Members, Staff and Volunteers Must Know to Secure the Gift. And short of a medical elixir, it's the next best thing for emboldening you, your board members and volunteers to ask with skill, finesse … and powerful results.

Jerold Panas, who as a staff person, board member and volunteer has secured gifts ranging from $50 to $50 million, understands the art of asking perhaps better than anyone in America.

He has harnessed all of his knowledge and experience and produced what many are already calling a landmark book.

What Asking convincingly shows — and one reason staff will applaud the book and board members will devour it — is that it doesn't take stellar communication skills to be an effective asker. Nearly everyone, regardless of their persuasive ability, can become an effective fundraiser if they follow Jerold Panas' step-by-step guidelines.

The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action

Here is the book-by the recognized architects of the Balanced Scorecard--that shows how managers can use this revolutionary tool to mobilize their people to fulfill the company's mission. More than just a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard is a management system that can channel the energies, abilities, and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization toward achieving long-term strategic goals.

Kaplan and Norton demonstrate how senior executives in industries such as banking, oil, insurance, and retailing are using the Balanced Scorecard both to guide current performance and to target future performance. They show how to use measures in four categories-financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth-to align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives and to identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives.

The authors also reveal how to use the Balanced Scorecard as a robust learning system for testing, gaining feedback on, and updating the organization's strategy. Finally, they walk through the steps that managers in any company can use to build their own Balanced Scorecard.

The Balanced Scorecard provides the management system for companies to invest in the long term-in customers, in employees, in new product development, and in systems-rather than managing the bottom line to pump up short-term earnings. It will change the way you measure and manage your business.

The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

Much of our business thinking is shaped by delusions -- errors of logic and flawed judgments that distort our understanding of the real reasons for a company's performance. In a brilliant and unconventional book, Phil Rosenzweig unmasks the delusions that are commonly found in the corporate world. These delusions affect the business press and academic research, as well as many bestselling books that promise to reveal the secrets of success or the path to greatness. Such books claim to be based on rigorous thinking, but operate mainly at the level of storytelling. They provide comfort and inspiration, but deceive managers about the true nature of business success.

The most pervasive delusion is the Halo Effect. When a company's sales and profits are up, people often conclude that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary leader, capable employees, and a superb corporate culture. When performance falters, they conclude that the strategy was wrong, the leader became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture was stagnant. In fact, little may have changed -- company performance creates a Halo that shapes the way we perceive strategy, leadership, people, culture, and more.

Drawing on examples from leading companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, Nokia, and ABB, Rosenzweig shows how the Halo Effect is widespread, undermining the usefulness of business bestsellers from In Search of Excellence to Built to Last and Good to Great.

Rosenzweig identifies nine popular business delusions. Among them:

• The Delusion of Absolute Performance: Company performance is relative to competition, not absolute, which is why following a formula can never guarantee results. Success comes from doing things better than rivals, which means that managers have to take risks.
• The Delusion of Rigorous Research: Many bestselling authors praise themselves for the vast amount of data they have gathered, but forget that if the data aren't valid, it doesn't matter how much was gathered or how sophisticated the research methods appear to be. They trick the reader by substituting sizzle for substance.
• The Delusion of Single Explanations: Many studies show that a particular factor, such as corporate culture or social responsibility or customer focus, leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

In what promises to be a landmark book, The Halo Effect replaces mistaken thinking with a sharper understanding of what drives business success and failure. The Halo Effect is a guide for the thinking manager, a way to detect errors in business research and to reach a clearer understanding of what drives business success and failure.

Skeptical, brilliant, iconoclastic, and mercifully free of business jargon, Rosenzweig's book is nevertheless dead serious, making his arguments about important issues in an unsparing and direct way that will appeal to a broad business audience. For managers who want to separate fact from fiction in the world of business, The Halo Effect is essential reading -- witty, often funny, and sharply argued, it's an antidote to so much of the conventional thinking that clutters business bookshelves.

Guide to Analysing Companies (Economist (Hardcover))

In this completely revised fourth edition, noted academic and consultang, Bob Vause, helps managers, investors, analysts, and students understand and uncover a business's true worth and performance.

Strategy and the Business Landscape (2nd Edition)

Supply Chain Management (3rd Edition)

This book brings together the strategic role of the supply chain, key strategic drivers of supply chain performance, and the underlying tools and techniques for supply chain analysis. Students are able to articulate the strategic importance of supply chain thinking and support their ideas with evidence that can be built using models.

The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process And Technology

Winner Of The 2007 Shingo Prize For Excellence In Manufacturing Research!

The ability to bring new and innovative products to market rapidly is the prime critical competence for any successful consumer-driven company. All industries, especially automotive, are slashing product development lead times in the current hyper-competitive marketplace. This book is the first to thoroughly examine and analyze the truly effective product development methodology that has made Toyota the most forward-thinking company in the automotive industry.

In The Toyota Product Development System: Integrating People, Process, and Technology, James Morgan and Jeffrey Liker compare and contrast the world-class product development process of Toyota with that of a U.S. competitor. They use extensive examples from Toyota and the U.S. competitor to demonstrate value stream mapping as an extraordinarily powerful tool for continuous improvement.

Through examples and case studies, this book illustrates specific techniques and proven practices for dealing with challenges associated with product development, such as synchronizing multiple disciplines, multiple function workload leveling, compound process variation, effective technology integration, and knowledge management.

Readers of this book can focus on optimizing the entire product development value stream rather than focus on a specific tool or technology for local improvements.