Whether you are the owner of your own small business, a middle manager in a mid-sized company, or the CEO of a multinational, this book aims to show you how to improve your profits and productivity, following the principles of the Deming management method.

    But it's not easy to do. Delegating Work quickly walks you through the fundamentals of: Establishing a productive environment Assigning the right work to the right people Conducting an effective hand-off meeting Monitoring without micromanaging Don't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives--from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

    Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors,, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing. Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter's rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.

    But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.Originally self-published and already a business "cult classic", this personally empowering and entertaining look at the intersection between human creativity and the bottom line is now widely available to bookstores. It will be a must-read for any manager looking for new ways to invigorate employees, and any professional who wants to achieve his or her best, most self-expressive, most creative and fulfilling work.

    Silos devastate organizations, kill productivity, push good people out the door, and jeopardize the achievement of corporate goals. As with his other books, Lencioni writes Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars as a fictional--but eerily realistic--story. The story is about Jude Cousins, an eager young management consultant struggling to launch his practice by solving one of the more universal and frustrating problems faced by his clients. Through trial and error, he develops a simple yet ground-breaking approach for helping them transform confusion and infighting into clarity and alignment.

    You will learn the techniques successful leaders use to make their strategic decisions and you will be given the tools to ensure that your team is in alignment to achieving common goals. Leading Quality is the first book that teaches why quality is important and how to incorporate it within the workspace. Praise for Leading Quality:   “A quality mindset remains key to differentiating your product and your company. Leading Quality offers key lessons to develop this mindset.” - Michael Lopp, author of Managing Humans and VP of Product Engineering at Slack “Leading Quality communicates just how important a focus on quality is within your company and is one of the few titles that actually teaches how to lead quality in a clear yet captivating manner.”  - Shesh Patel, Engineering Manager at The New York Times “Three elements define any successful product: quality, quality, and quality. Leading Quality is a comprehensive and practical guide to embedding quality into the DNA of any product organization.” - Nick Caldwell, CPO at Looker and former VP of Engineering at Reddit

    

    Miller revealed how personal accountability helps to create opportunity, overcome obstacles, and achieve goals by eliminating blame, complaining, and procrastination. The result? Stronger organizations, more dynamic teams, and healthier relationships.Now Miller takes readers to the next level to show how they can use the power of the QBQ! and personal accountability every day.When a light switch is flipped the flow of energy that is released reaches the lightbulb in an instant, bringing it to life. Similarly, asking the right kind of question-a QBQ-is the first step to empowering what Miller calls the Advantage Principles-five essential practices that will lead to a richer experience in every aspect of life:- LEARNING: live an engaged and energized life through positive personal growth and change- OWNERSHIP: attain goals by becoming a solution-oriented person who solves problems- CREATIVITY: find new ways to achieve by succeeding within the box- SERVICE: build a legacy by helping others succeed- TRUST: develop deep and rewarding relationshipsWith compelling real-life stories and keen insights, Miller demonstrates how anyone can find success and satisfaction by flipping the switch.

    This title provides hundreds of ready-made phrases that you can use to describe any employee's performance in 74 different skill areas.

    Yet although the heart of Six Sigma is statistics, most books on Six Sigma give a general overview, with little detail on actually Using the Six Sigma tools. Books that cover Six Sigma statistics typically are 500+ pages and cost near USD100. Basic Statistics for Six Sigma gives the information needed to apply the statistical tools of Six Sigma to real-world problems in a simplified, USD24.95 paperback format, for Greenbelts and Six Sigma Project Team Leaders. A typical company's Greenbelt training in Six Sigma includes 7 books, 4 software packages, and 3 weeks of class work. It is very extensive in statistics. Although this kind of course is excellent, not all companies or individuals want to commit to that level of instruction. Statistics for Six Sigma--Made Easy! describes only the tools used by most successful Six Sigma practitioners. The only software package needed is Excel, and the 14 formulas and 5 tables included in the book enable you to use all the basic Six Sigma statistical tools. Using these tools will enable a person t

    Along the way, we encounter black holes, turtles, snakes, dragons, axe-sharpening, and yak-shaving—and take a guided tour through the theories and methods, both brilliant and misguided, that litter the history of software development, from the famous ‘mythical man-month’ to Extreme Programming. Not just for technophiles but for anyone captivated by the drama of invention, Dreaming in Code offers a window into both the information age and the workings of the human mind.

    This book connects Lean tools to the Lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the reader in seeing Lean for what it truly is: to create a learning and problem solving culture. Written to educate the entire organization on the fundamentals of Lean thinking, this is the perfect source to engage all team members at all levels of an organization.

    During a series of talks with a gifted magician named Cayla, Steve comes to realize the power of taking responsibility for his situation and not playing the victim. Passing along the knowledge she has learned from The One Minute Manager, Cayla teaches Steve the three tricks of self leadership. These three techniques not only empower him to keep his job, but give him the skills he needs to keep growing, learning, and achieving.The primary message of SELF-LEADERSHIP AND THE ONE MINUTE MANAGER is that power, freedom, and autonomy come from having the right mindset and the skills needed to take personal responsibility for success.

    Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly—and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren't just irritating, they're costly—sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces.Crucial Confrontations teaches skills drawn from 10,000 hours of real-life observations to increase confidence in facing issues like:- An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?- Your boss just committed you to a deadline you know you can't meet—and not-so-subtly hinted he doesn't want to hear complaints about it.- Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by forty points. Speak now, pay later.- An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law. Can you spell unemployment?- Family members fret over how to tell granddad that he should no longer drive his car. This is going to get ugly.- A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers "how things work around here" and decides not to say anything.Everyone knows how to run for cover, or if adequately provoked, step up to these confrontations in a way that causes a real ruckus. That we have down pat. Crucial Confrontations teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand, and doesn't harm the relationship—and in fact, even strengthens it.Crucial Confrontations borrows from twenty years of research involving two groups. More than 25,000 people helped the authors identify those who were most influential during crucial confrontations. They spent 10,000 hours watching these people, documented what they saw, and then trained and tested with more than 300,000 people. Second, they measured the impact of crucial confrontations improvements on organizational and team performance—the results were immediate and sustainable: twenty to fifty percent improvements in measurable performance.

    That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.