Product Development for the Lean Enterprise (Michael N. Kennedy)
This is a Goal-esque book that follows the tribulations of the fictional Infrared Technologies Corporation as they struggle with the entropy that has set in to their company and decide on how they will change to recover. A soon-to-retire engineer, Jon Stevens, is tapped to lead a task force to decide what to do. In the end, they decide to adopt a lean approach based on principles from Toyota and there will apparently be a happy ending.
I might have enjoyed this book more if I hadn't already read many books and articles on Toyota's principles and approach to product development. I already learned about and bought in to those ideas. If I hadn't, getting exposed to those ideas as they were presented in this book might have been new and exciting.
As it was, though, there were some things about the book that bothered me. First, they make the previous process proponents out to be the villians in the story and easy targets. At the end of the story, they apparently will be out on the street looking for new jobs. I didn't like this and it seemed to black and white to me. If I'm leading a change effort, is that one of the results I'll seek? Maybe I'm naive but I don't think so.
Second, the book paints the desired end state as a better world where the creativity and ideas come from the bottom up, not where ideas are formulated and driven from the top down and the people below are expected to comply. But at the end of the book, the author implies that the only way he thinks companies will be successful in transitioning to that world is if the change process is formulated and driven from the top down and the people below are expected to sign up. The book concludes with a pitch for hiring consultants affiliated with the author.
I'll caveat my comments here by saying that I don't have a lot of experience as a consultant getting whole companies to change their way of doing things so take these comments with that in mind. But it seems to me that can't be the only way a change like this can be successfully made. This past week, Matthew May gave a talk at work. His recent book, The Elegant Solution, also talks about Toyota's approach and how companies can adopt it. His opinion is that changes like this can happen starting from a single team. That idea seems a lot more hopeful and possible in more situations than the approach advocated in this book.
That said, I think this is a valuable book. Reading it helped add to and refine my ideas about lean. I'd rate it 3 stars out of 5.
Product Development for the Lean Enterprise (Michael N. Kennedy)