Books by our speakers and other leading and respected authors on Business, Strategic IT and Lean & Agile

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

by Don Reinertsen

Most management books cover only a few ideas and often at too high a level to be useful in day-to-day work. Flow is different. It covers a lot of ground, more than 150 management principles divided into eight areas. As you can imagine, with this much ground to cover, the prose are to the point and action oriented.

Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developers Tool Kit

by Don Reinertsen

This text on product development combines the analytical tools of queuing, information and system theories with the ideas of organisation design and management. Don aims to answer such questions as: when should we use a sequential or concurrent process; should there be centralized or decentralized control; and should the organisation be based along functional or team lines?

Developing Products in Half the Time: New Rules, New Tools

by Preston G. Smith and Don Reinertsen

In this era of global competition and accelerating product life cycles, the need to get new products to market faster is more compelling than ever. What was once considered fast development is now commonplace.

Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point

by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck

Building on their breakthrough bestsellers Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s latest book shows software leaders and team members exactly how to drive high-value change throughout a software organisation - and make it stick. They go far beyond generic implementation guidelines, demonstrating exactly how to make lean work in real projects, environments, and companies.

Also available: ebook edition

Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash

by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck

This book draws on the Poppendiecks’ unparalleled experience helping development organisations optimize the entire software value stream. You’ll discover the right questions to ask, the key issues to focus on, and techniques proven to work. The authors present case studies from leading-edge software organisations, and offer practical exercises for jumpstarting your own Lean initiatives.

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit

by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck

This is a book of thinking tools for software development leaders. It is a tool kit for translating generally accepted lean principles into effective agile practices that fit your unique environment. Lean thinking has a long history of generating dramatic improvements in fields as diverse as manufacturing, health care and construction.

Also available: ebook edition

Systems Thinking in the Public Sector: The Failure of the Reform Regime.... and a Manifesto for a Better Way

by John Seddon

John Seddon argues powerfully for the government to forget sticking plasters like CRM and citizen empowerment and says don’t tweak the system. Ditch it. Systems Thinking in the Public Sector gives example after example of exactly how the system fails from housing benefits and care for the elderly to call centres like Consumer Direct. Drawing on Seddon’s extensive experience working as a consultant with UK public sector managers, this is a fiercely uncompromising, yet rigorous manifesto for change.

Freedom from Command & Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

by John Seddon

An adherent of the Toyota Production System, John Seddon explains how traditional top-down decision making within service organisations leads to managers who are detached from employees and remote from operations. He demonstrates that decision-making based on purpose-related measures (such as putting customers first and improving services) can help managers reconnect with operations, see waste, and exploit opportunities for improvement.

Freedom from Command & Control: A Better Way to Make the Work Work

by John Seddon

This is a management book that challenges convention and aims to appeal to a wide target audience. Seddon argues that while many commentators acknowledge command and control is failing us, no one provides an alternative. His contention is the alternative can only be understood when you see the failings of command and control by taking the better - systems - view. There is little in the book that you would find in a normal management curriculum. Seddon is scathing and controversial about leadership theorists, maintaining that leadership is being able to talk about how the work works with the people who do it.

The Case Against ISO9000: How to Create Real Quality in Your Organisation

by John Seddon

ISO 9000 claims to be a standard for quality management but John Seddon argues it has nothing to do with quality, being based on entirely different theory. organisations register to ISO 9000 because they are obliged to - market-place coercion works on the principle of “you comply or we won’t buy”, and registration is no guarantee of quality. In this attack on one of the sacred cows of business today, John Seddon shows how the ISO standards are not only failing to deliver the improved quality they promise, but in most cases are actually damaging the companies that have implemented them.

I Want You to Cheat!: The Unreasonable Guide to Service and Quality in Organisations

by John Seddon

Illustrates many key principles which need to be understood when improving the performance of organisations. By cheating Seddon means that we should do the sensible thing rather than what is expected according to a bureaucratic rule.

The Concise Executive Guide to Agile

by Israel Gat

The Guide targets executives from every function that Agile affects to provide them with the principles they need in order to become effective with an Agile initiative. The guide covers the rationale for Agile, implementing it, fitting it into your company, and scaling it to the enterprise level.

Note: currently only available as an ebook.

Myself and Other More Important Matters

by Charles Handy

Long recognised as one of the world’s leading business thinkers (over two million copies of his books have been sold around the world), in “Myself and Other More Important Matters” he leaves the management territory he has so effectively and influentially mapped in the past to explore the wider issues and dilemmas - both moral and creative - raised by the turning points of his long and successful life. Here he investigates the big issues of how life can best be lived as they have emerged from the unfolding of his life and his unique and influential understanding of what really matters.

The New Philanthropists

by Charles Handy and Elizabeth Handy

Who are the new philanthropists? And how is their philanthropy ‘new’? In this remarkable and inspiring book, the eminent management writer Charles Handy and his wife Elizabeth, a portrait photographer, have collaborated to portray a new generation of practical philanthropists, men and women who have made their own fortunes and decided to move on from financial success to try to help those in need. They are doing so not simply by giving their money away to charities and agencies but by helping actively, working on the spot with the very people who need their aid, ensuring that the initiatives are sustainable in the longer term.

The Age of Unreason: New Thinking For A New World

by Charles Handy

If you put a frog in water and slowly heat it, the frog will eventually let itself be boiled to death. We, too, will not survive unless we actively respond to the radical way our world is changing.
“Here is an inspiring vision of an era of new discoveries, new enlightenment and new freedoms” - Association of Business Executives.
“It succinctly points out that change cannot be avoided and explains how we can turn it to our advantage. Invaluable to all those who wish to succeed and prosper” - Industrial Magazine.

The Empty Raincoat: Making Sense of the Future

by Charles Handy

Charles Handy reaches for a philosophy beyond the mechanics of business organisations, beyond material choices, to try to establish an alternative universe where work ethics can contain a natural sense of continuity, connections and sense of direction. With warmth, wit and the most challenging insights, Charles Handy seeks to turn paradox into real progress.

The Elephant and the Flea: Looking Backwards to the Future

by Charles Handy

Charles Handy’s bestselling book looks at how individuals (the fleas in his analogy) relate to multi-national conglomerates (the elephants). In addition to addressing how and why we work today, he covers a wide range of preoccupations and issues, including the increasing fear of big business.

Also available: ebook edition

Gods of Management: The Changing Work of Organisations

by Charles Handy

Charles Handy’s four gods symbolise the different styles of management to be found in businesses and organisations today. Zeus is a dynamic entrepreneur who makes snap decisions. Apollo is the god of order who defines staff through their job description and not personality. Athena is the goddess who recognises expertise and creates a task culture. Dionysus creates a culture where staff owe little allegiance to a manager. Each god represents different values and creates a differing culture. To be successful a leader, or manager, needs to be aware of the culture within their organisation and to be able to work to its strengths to create a productive and satisfying workplace.This is the essential handbook for understanding management styles, an essential analysis of the changing patterns of business.

The New Alchemists

by Charles Handy

The New Alchemists are people who ‘make something out of nothing’. They are not necessarily rich or famous but they have dreams and ideas and have the courage, vision and energy to realise them.

fruITion: Creating the Ultimate Corporate Strategy for Information Technology

by Chris Potts

In fruITion, Chris Potts sets out his views on the best place for IT within the organisation and extracting the best business value from investment in a very easy to read fashion. His main themes are that having IT as a separate department has failed to deliver business benefits from investment, that IT should be (largely) integrated into the business units and that initiatives should be treated as business change projects rather than IT projects.

Also available: ebook edition

RecrEAtion: Realizing the Extraordinary Contribution of Your Enterprise Architects

by Chris Potts

RecrEAtion takes the reader through a similar journey for Enterprise Architects, that fruITion did for CIOs. Chris Potts sets out his views on the best place for Enterprise Architecture via a story of someone coming into the role in a large corporation and exploring how to make the best of the role.

Also available: ebook edition