Book Review: The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

This time I got my hands on the book The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality. I have to admit that I wasn't really excited to read the book. Demings thoughts have been coming up from so many different directions, that I wanted to give him a shot. I'm glad I did, his thoughts were marvelous.

This book isn't really a book and neither it is written by Deming. This book is a collection of Demings writings, personal notes and speeches from throughout his career. It goes through all the main thought Deming was talking about in his books and his teachings. It tells those in a bit shorter format, but I think it was enough for me.

The book goes quite far back to 1950's and 1960's in telling what has been the problems with companies back then. Strangely the problems haven't really changed that much from those years. Of course many aspects have changed, but the underlying problems are the same. Also many of the solution proposals hopefully suit to current organizations as well.

I mark to books pages I will come back later for reference or future investigation. From the books I've read this might have had most markings done by me. There were quite a few good thoughts and sentences that will come handy in the future.

I have to admit that Demings thought were not totally strange to me. I've read those from multiple sources beforehand, but this was the first time I read his own words. That might have helped me a bit on understanding this book. It's not difficult book to read, but it needs some thinking to understand.

It was an excellent book and I enjoyed it. Even though it's old, thoughts are valid and valuable. This is a book which many if not all the the people who care about their organizations improvement should read.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Book I read - The Toyota Way

Mainly because of interest to Agile SW development and Lean thinking, I read The Toyota Way -14 management principles from the world's greatest manufacturer from Jeffrey K. Liker. Like it says, it's a book about Toyota much praised manufacturing system.

Whole idea behind the book is to give an better view what makes Toyota manufacturing system such a good one. It introduces TPS (Toyota Production System), Kanban and lots of other systems they use.Still most importantly it tells about the importance of company culture, continuous learning and true understanding about the thinking behind TPS.

I've always been a big fan of thinking, "understand before you act" and that seems to be one of the key principles in Toyota also. Almost everywhere in this book it comes obvious that thorough understanding is the key to success. Hiding true problems behind quick win fixes is not profitable in the long run.

I really liked the book. It opens quite well the thinking behind TPS and the culture what they have there in Toyota. Of course it's just a tip of iceberg you understand based on one book, but at least I think it's the right ice berg to understand. Just trying to learn Kanban and Lean by how others are doing it, easily misses lot of very important aspects of the whole methodology.

I would recommend this book to all of you interested about Lean or TPS. Also those of you who see it beneficial to understand different kind companies, business models, manufacturing and company culture's.

The only small recommendation I would like to give to Dr Liker is, that maybe in the next edition there could be glossary, since there's so many terms flying around all the time, it's sometimes bit tricky to keep on track of all those.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen