For those who might be interested, my new book, Simple Excellence, is coming out later this week - don't know exactly when - it is belng released in conjunction with the big AME Conference going on in Baltimore. Between now and its formal release you can still get the pre-release discount from Amazon.
I wrote it with Adam Zak. For those who don't know Adam he is without a doubt the leading Lean executive recruiter in the game. He holds forth not far from me in the suburbs of Chicago and has a keen insight into the good, the bad and the ugly of executive successes and foibles in lean transformations.
The gist of the book is twofold: For one, we are convinced that lean is all about simplification and getting rid of the clutter, hence the title. The second objective is to spell out the role of the entire management team in the lean business model. There is probably too much literature out there on the role of operations management, and a glut of executive leadership writing. And there is a growing body of information on accounting's role. But in too many companies the critical roles of the rest of the team - marketing and sales, HR, IT, engineering and so forth - has not been discussed. In Simple Excellence we hope we have contributed to filling that gap. Hence the subtitle, "Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation".
It includes a lot of examples from various lean companies and great lean leaders we have learned from along the way - guys like Bob Chapman and Greg Wahl - and was written in my blog style - concise and pretty blunt. So it is short (150 pages) but not necessarily sweet, rather than in mind numbing academic prose. The President of Parker Hannifin's Aerospace Group has given it his stamp of approval. Hopefully you will too.