What to Read: Strategic Planning: ListenAlaska+

"Are you tired of productivity consultants—or worse, your boss—pushing you to do more with less? You're in luck. Laura Stack knows your to-do list is already packed to capacity, so she shows you how to accomplish more by doing less. Yes, you read that right. Stack's innovative time-management system lets you work less and achieve more. Following Stack's step-by-step Productivity Workflow Formula, you'll organize your life around the tasks that really matter and—this is crucial—let go of those that don't. Dozens of practical strategies will help you reduce your commitments, distractions, interruptions, and inefficiencies. You'll shrink your to-do list and save time—around ninety minutes a day—while skyrocketing your results and maintaining your sanity."

Audio book
"In their landmark book The Machine That Changed the World, James Womack and Daniel Jones, two of the top industrial analysts in the world, explained how companies can dramatically improve their performance through the "lean production" approach pioneered by Toyota. Lean Thinking extends these ideas to provide a rallying cry for today's corporate leaders.
After a decade of downsizing and reengineering, most companies in North America, Europe, and Japan are still stuck, searching for a formula for sustainable growth and success. The problem, as Womack and Jones explain in Lean Thinking, is that managers have lost sight of value for the customer and how to create it. By focusing on their existing organizations and outdated definitions of value, managers create waste, and the economies of the advanced countries continue to stagnate.
What's needed instead is lean thinking to help managers clearly specify value, to line up all the value-creating activities for a specific product along a value stream, and to make value flow smoothly at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection. The first part of the book describes each of these concepts and makes them come alive with striking examples.
As Lean Thinking clearly demonstrates, these simple ideas can breathe new life into any company in any industry, routinely doubling both productivity and sales while stabilizing employment. But most managers will need guidance on how to make the lean leap in their firm. Part II provides a step-by-step action plan, based on in-depth studies of fifty lean companies in a wide range of industries across the world — including Pratt & Whitney, Porsche, and Toyota.
Even those readers who believe they have embraced lean thinking will discover in Part III that another dramatic leap is possible by creating a lean enterprise for each of their product families that tightly links all value-creating activities from concept to product launch, from order to delivery, and from raw materials into the arms of the consumer. This new concept takes the best features from the American, German, and Japanese industrial traditions and recombines them in a way that can be applied to every economic activity, from long-distance travel to construction to health care."

"The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. In reality, most innovations are borne from rigor and discipline. Breakthrough ideas-whether for a new bicycle, an advertising campaign, a treatment plan for diabetes, or a program aimed at tackling the national obesity epidemic-emerge not by chance, but by studying and embracing the immediate challenges we encounter every day in our offices and homes, laboratories and hospitals, classrooms and conference rooms, and in all the spaces in between. We don't simply realize solutions; we design them.

In this book Tim Brown, CEO of the celebrated innovation and design firm IDEO, introduces us to design thinking. Design is not just about creating elegant objects or beautifying the world around us. The best designers match necessity to utility, constraint to possibility, and need to demand. These design thinkers rely on rigorous observations of how we use spaces and the objects and services that occupy them; they discover patterns where others see complexity and confusion; they synthesize new ideas from seemingly disparate fragments; and they convert problems into opportunities. Design thinking is a method in which genius, in the end, is not required.

Design thinking is valuable not just in so-called creative industries or for people tasked with designing products. Rather, it is often most powerful when applied to abstract, multifaceted problems: improving a guest experience at a hotel, encouraging bank customers to save more, or developing a compelling narrative for a public-service campaign. It has been used by organizations such as Nokia to rethink global gaming and by the Department of Energy to encourage conservation. Design thinking is now being applied to address a wide range of issues and concerns, from the delivery of clean drinking water in the developing world to improving the efficacy of airport security and microfinancing.

This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a blueprint for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking-an approach for creative problem solving-into all facets of their organizations, products, or services to discover new alternatives for business and society as a whole.

Written with imagination, humor, and vision, this vital and inspiring guide is essential reading for anyone confronting the challenges of today in order to create the opportunities of tomorrow. "

"A riddle: Five frogs are sitting on a log. Four decide to jump off. How many are left? Answer: Five Why? Because there's a difference between deciding and doing...Designed for corporate managers and CEOs caught up in the whirlwind of change, every chapter provides accessible ideas and wisdom for navigating the most demanding business transitions. The authors offer a unique hands-on perspective based on their work with top Fortune 500 firms. As they state: "Increasingly, the companies that win are those that learn faster, act quicker and adapt sooner. They will compress time by making and executing early, informed decisions about economic value creation, ruthless prioritization and focused resource allocation. They will use these decisions to take early firm stands on management deployment, organization structure and culture. Their actions will increasingly be linked to long-term, sustained economic value creation." The advice and expertise offered in this book can be used to solve a range of operational problems from speeding up new product development to merging two businesses; from changing company culture to repositioning a business in a while new marketplace. Whatever the challenges and opportunities facing you, your company, your industry, Five Frogs on a Log will move you from deciding to doing."

"Healing the Downsized Organization is for managers and employees who must make sense of dramatically changed workplaces after reengineering, restructuring, or downsizing. Here are "best practices" from those who are successfully reinventing their organizations and re-creating healthy workplaces. Documented examples from executives, managers, and employees who have bounced back from this challenge reveal how they minimized pain during downsizing and discovered promising possibilities for changed employer-employee relationships. Dramatic profiles of four organizations--representing manufacturing, media journalism, education, and health care--provide lessons you can practice today, whether downsizing is unfolding now or whether it looms in the future. From interviews with CEOs, managers, and employees, you will understand how individuals at all levels have handled the tension between personal and organizational goals, managed the human struggles, and achieved victories as they cut costs and redeployed resources to face competition or changing market conditions."

"This action-oriented book presents the revolutionary J Curve model, which tracks people's performance, thoughts, and emotions at each of the five stages of the change process, from resistance through positive acceptance-key knowledge you need to lead your team and speed implementation. Used by leading companies such as IBM, Chevron, Toyota-Lexus, and 3M, the J Curve gives you proven tactics and tools for quickly getting employees to a positive stage on the curve.

In this groundbreaking book, Jellison introduces a new approach to change-Activation. Communication and persuasion aren't enough to help people overcome their doubts and anxieties. You'll put these Activation techniques to work immediately as you learn how to

Communicate at ground level-breaking change down into doable steps so people can achieve the goal
Front-load rewards-motivating people to persist through the most difficult phases of change
Create accountability-linking performance to larger organizational goals
Personalize praise-tailoring approval to individuals to motivate higher levels of performance

Managing the Dynamics of Change presents an innovative method for getting employees to quickly commit to change efforts and simultaneously ramp up their performance.

Drawing upon his extensive field research and consulting experience with Fortune 500 companies, Jerald Jellison, Ph.D. reveals how effective change occurs and shows you how to manage your employees' reaction to change, engage your team's emotions and actions, and move employees up the curve as fast as possible. "

"Most attempts to change fall flat. Around the world, countless change efforts are underway in all kinds of organizations, spearheaded by leaders with good intentions. Despite the good intentions, the majority of these programs will not succeed. Why? In this radical new book, practitioner Rodger Dean Duncan shows that humanness, approachability, and friendliness are necessary but often overlooked elements of making change successful. Change cannot be achieved by a press release, slogan, or announcement. Effective organizational change requires the active, mindful participation of the people affected by the change. Leaders must learn how to bring their entire team on board with changes and ensure they are invested in the process as well as in the outcome. The Friendly Factor is not just a play on words. It's the very foundation for effectively engaging people's heads, hearts, and hopes. The Change-Friendly framework is based on timeless principles that are tried and true in even the toughest situations. Using this framework will enable you to create effective, lasting change in your organization."

Audio book
"One of the most celebrated concepts in corporate life, teamwork is falling short on its promise. Why Teams Don't Work identifies the obstacles (most of them people-made) that prevent teams from achieving their potential, suggests methods to remove those obstacles, and explains how to take care of the team members. Packed with down-to-earth questions and answers about teams, Why Teams Don't Work facilitates teams in:

• eliminating confusion about team goals

• helping individual team members accept their roles

• making decisions

• enjoying appropriate rewards

• helping team leaders act like leaders

When teams do work, they increase productivity, improve communications, and accomplish work ordinary groups can't. Whether you're a manager or a team member, this recording will give you the tools to keep your team operating creatively and efficiently. "

"The perfect prescription for any organization

Increasingly popular with large and mid-sized companies around the world, Lean Six Sigma is the new hybridization of Six Sigma and Lean methodologies, and there is no better approach for achieving operational excellence in an organization.

But how do you implement Lean Six Sigma, and what does it entail?

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Lean Six Sigma answers this question with unprecedented clarity and turnkey elegance. Part one gives you all the background you need to understand Lean Six Sigma – what it is, where it came from, what it has done for so many organizations and what it can do for you and your company.

Parts two and three of the book give you a prescribed yet flexible roadmap to follow in selecting, enacting and realizing improvements from Lean Six Sigma projects. Within this step-by-step structure, the authors demonstrate when and how to use the many Lean Six Sigma statistics and "tools" – packing the pages with diagrams, real-life examples, templates, tips and advice. If you are a Green Belt or a Black Belt, or trainee, these two parts will be invaluable to you.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Lean Six Sigma is the first book of its kind to integrate the Lean Six Sigma tools within a clear stepwise progression, so readers know when and how to actually apply them in their jobs. As such, this book is superior as a companion to any corporate or organizational Lean Six Sigma "deployment."

No more complex hodgepodge

Other books about Lean and/or Six Sigma tend to provide a lot of good information, tools and statistics – but mostly in a disconnected way, not in a way that is straightforward and user friendly. This makes an already complex subject seem still complex to the neophyte reader. On the other hand, the structure and progression of this book unfolds Lean Six Sigma in a way that a reader can easily become a user, and move more quickly from knowledge to application."

"Methods of improving business processes are developed on an ongoing basis, but few are successful. Common problems encountered include the failure of processes to meet expectations and the inability to sustain or replicate these business processes. Involvement of personnel at grassroots level, as well as at management level, is essential in implementing effective process improvement methods.

The authors present a step-by-step approach to the issue of effective process improvement, offering more than 200 tips and guidelines as well as addressing specific common problems and issues. The strategy presented is to take a broad and intuitive, but learned view of process improvement methods, and the tactics expounded are based on guidelines, common faults, and lessons learned. The authors disparage process improvement operations that depend on jargon and the support of just upper management, and promote grassroots involvement and self-sustaining measurement, making this an essential guide for all with involvement in process improvement. "