Book Review: The Leader's Compass

A Personal Leadership Philosophy Is Your Key to Success (2nd Edition)

This was a quick read told in a story about a rapidly growing organization, their journey to excellence, and the role that mentors play in the building of people, specifically Leadership.  The story's main characters are Guy, a 29 year old Marketer from Penn State, and Stanley, a retired Naval Officer that is a good friend and neighbor to Guy.  The new leader was 'sort of' put in charge after an acquisition with a new large scale and ill-defined project.  With this acquisition are new team members who are trying to fit in the organization with no information from the boss.

Book Review: The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System

Forrest W. Breyfogle III, the author of "The Integrated Enterprise Excellence System", has written about a system of strategic tools and methods to see the alignment and performance of organizations.  His book lays out the different methods of metrics, management governance, goals, and strategic development.  He connects these and other concepts using an Enterprise DMAIC model.

In my opinion this book was written for Leaders and Managers of organizations, people who's work is at the system level of the organization.  These could be team leaders, supervisors, managers, and executives.

Mr. Breyfogle has been a proponent of the "wise use" of statistical techniques and this book does a great job of connecting those dots to transforming organizations into customer satisfying machines.  I recommend this book to all my readers.

Book Review: A3 Problem Solving

Over the past week I had a chance to read "A3 Problem Solving" by Jamie Flinchbaugh.  This book is easy to read and Jamie does a great job connecting the dots at the high level down to how a team interacts with the information and knowledge gained using the form.  Leaders will gain understanding of transformation that sticks.

A3's are a one-page brief of the opportunity or project that reads through the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle.  I'm sure some of us have seen 125 slide briefings of Green Belt or Black Belt projects, but this brings it to a scope appropriate for easy and quick consumption.  I used the word "opportunity" because problems we have on our teams with performance are a chance for all of us to learn.

The profound part of the book is about measuring the success of Lean.  It's not about the number of people trained, but "the percentage of the leader's own work that has changed". You can see the change in the performance of the team, and the practices of the leader.

Whether you are new or old to Lean Office transformation, this book can provide further insight to the use of A3.  I highly recommend this book to all of my readers.