As a huge Ed Deming fan, I'd recommend these books:
- The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Deming-Leadership-Principle...
- The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education: https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Industry-Government-Educati...
- The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer: https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Way-Management-Principles-Manu...
Deming is really a great thinking in the area of product development and agile methodologies.
I highly recommend the books "Toyota Production System" and "The Machine That Changed The World" for a background on the manufacturing cousin/ancestor of agile software development.
I wish there were newer studies though that cover the rise of Hyundai/Kia quality in the last two decades. If you know of any please let me know.
There are a lot of amazing concepts that Toyota developed. It requires a lot of discipline, focus and commitment to implement properly.
One thing I didn’t see mentioned that Tesla is currently doing is a very strong relationship between design and production. The upcoming Cybertruck for example doesn’t have paint and it has an exoskeleton design that should be much easier to produce. Over the years I have not seen any radical designs from Toyota that suggest that the ease of production was influencing radical design choices.
This is so clearly the optimal organization for a productive firm. But it falls on deaf ears every time. I gave up trying to proselytize. We're going to plan the whole product at the beginning of each quarter, save technical debt for later, over promise and under deliver. But why oh why are we burnt out working the weekends?
If you produce physical goods of any kind, Shigeo Shingo should absolutely be required reading. His ideas around quality control and setup times still sound revolutionary even now.
Can anyone comment here on the "Uddevalla concept"? Quoting https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/10785.html :
> Both researchers and practitioners in industrial organization ask themselves today whether lean production is the only possible model for the future. Enriching Production proposes a radically different alternative, which was put into practice at Volvo’s Uddevalla plant during its brief life span.
The book "Enriching Production" is at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10785/1/MPRA_paper_10785.pdf .
As I have no experience with lean nor with automotive production history, I find it hard to interpret.
The really funny thing is after you learn about TPS, and you talk to project managers, product owners, and executives, they all know it too. And none of them will use any of its lessons.
I've found that they basically fear the change and would rather keep doing things the same way even if it results in problems. They think it's safer to try to find a magic bullet that fits into their model, such as going "all-Agile" or "hiring SREs". Anything that isn't a radical change from their hierarchical, waterfall, arbitrary-deadline, afraid-of-deploying-on-friday, drop-everything-we-have-a-great-new-shiny-ball-to-chase bullshit.
Notice the blurred pics being presented as motion blur trying to do seal “secrets”
Continuous/Incremental improvements aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen
I've lost my faith in all this Just int Time marketing stuff. I tried to buy a specific Toyota car in Brazil and they said that it would take 6 months to get me one. I don't know which kind of legal bureaucracy created this, but I went with a Honda.
Closely related to the need to walk the Genba, this key principle suggests that to truly understand a situation you need to visit in person. The Toyota Production System requires a high level of management presence on the factory floor
From personal observation this is very true, Japan has a great and unpretentious grey collar culture. There's a way in which all work is seen as equally essential and managers aren't above anyone else. Not just at Toyota, but even waiters in restaurants are treated like this, I think it shows in how negatively tipping is seen in Japan.
It's also a culture that exists here in Germany in Mittelstand companies, although sadly less and less in large firms where management culture from the Anglosphere seems to have gained popularity over the last 20-30 years. American management always reminds me of the historical British army, where the gentry directly was recruited into the higher ranks American management and workers seem equally stratified.