Lean Book Club

Dr. John Kenagy's book, Designed to Adapt: Leading Healthcare in Challenging Times, is formula for saving healthcare one problem at a time is termed "Adaptive Design"; a set of methods, skills and tools designed to get healthcare back to the ideals of patient care by cultivating adaptability into the everyday work of the organization and its people. Dr. Kenagy explains how. Here's a preview: 

1. Learn the five characteristics of great adaptive leaders.
2. Discover disruptive innovation. Will you be a disruptive innovator? Or will you be disrupted? 
3. Explore principles for creating a safe, effective, learning laboratory and innovation incubator in every patient care environment. 
4. Recognize the seven roadblocks to sustainable healthcare innovation and learn how to eliminate them. 
5.  Learn the keys to financial strength and stability in 21st century healthcare. Does your strategy align? 

The secret to success in 21st century healthcare is no secret: Get patients exactly what they need at a continually lower cost. It's the way to fix healthcare.

Katie Anderson is an internationally recognized leadership coach, consultant, and professional speaker, best known for inspiring individuals and organizations to lead with intention. She founded her consulting practice in 2013 to work with leaders at all levels and organizations of all sizes to achieve higher levels of performance. She helps leaders to develop clarity of purpose and align their processes and behaviors in service of that purpose.  

Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn: Lessons from Toyota Leader Isao Yoshino on a Lifetime of Continuous Learning is a leadership book that defies generational or cultural divides, offering a refreshing, proven perspective for all those who dare to lead. Life is about looking back and reflecting upon experiences with the intention to look forward and envision where your life has the power to take you. Through each story, author Katie Anderson helps to share Isao Yoshino's experiences of leadership, learning, giving and empowering. Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn sheds light on what it means to weave a full life of purpose and intention - to pursue excellence and overcome challenges, to help others discover their best selves, and to develop our best selves at the same time.  

Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap: 12 Questions to Understand What's Truly Underneath Your Culture by Patrick Adams 

Seeking the best way to understand your company’s operations and leadership, hoping to finally see what’s truly underneath your culture? Take a trip with business performance coach Patrick Adams inside two different cultures -- one you’d like to avoid and one you’d like to emulate -- and then ask yourself the right questions. The answers may lead you -- and your organization’s various stakeholders -- somewhere extraordinary.  

Avoiding the Continuous Appearance Trap: 12 Questions to Understand What’s Truly 

Underneath Your Culture is a transformational book that weaves together the stories of two companies that, on the surface, appear to be quite similar. Underneath, however, they couldn’t be more different. There is a devastating distinction between being a company dedicated to continuous improvement and being one that’s about “continuous appearance” instead. The 12 questions that Patrick Adams outlines in his debut book for business leaders give readers the ability to assess their operations. At last, a practical guide to better understanding your company’s leadership and culture.  

Ed and Peter Schein's book, Humble Inquiry, Second Edition: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling, is a worldwide bestseller offers simple guidance for building the kind of open and trusting relationships vital for tackling global systemic challenges and developing adaptive, innovative organizations—over 200,000 copies sold and translated into seventeen languages!

We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell.” All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions—it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.

The Scheins define Humble Inquiry as “the gentle art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building relationships based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” It was inspired by Edgar’s twenty years of work in high-hazard industries and the health-care system, where honest communication can literally mean the difference between life and death. 

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.

In this revised and updated edition of Change By Design, Tim Brown reintroduces design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem-solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative.

Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; it is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society. 

Jamie Flinchbaugh's book People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem Every person in every function of every organization is involved in solving problems. They show up in your email inbox, in meetings, in your own work. They are strategic and tactical, mundane and breakthrough, easy and difficult. Most organizations want to, and need to, improve their people’s problem-solving efforts, and so they offer them tools, templates, and training. Yet this is not where the leverage for impact is found. People Solve Problems: The Power of Every Person, Every Day, Every Problem explores the real leverage to improve your problem solving. +

Problem-solving effectiveness is critical to success for both the problems you already know about and those you have not yet experienced. People Solve Problems will help you, and those you lead, to be more effective now and in the future. 

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life by John G. Miller.

The QBQ! book is one you’ll want everyone you know to have—but you should read it first!  Ever heard questions like these?  Why do we have to go through all this change? When is someone going to train me? Why can’t we find good people? When will that department do its job right?  Who dropped the ball? Why don’t they communicate better? Who’s going to solve the problem?  If so, the QBQ! message of personal accountability is right for your organization—and maybe even for you, too.   QBQ! is a quick 55-minute read, making it a marvelous book for the busy person—at work and at home. It is an excellent tool for teams, study groups, and as a giveaway at conferences. Full of fun, lighthearted, true-life stories, QBQ! and its message of personal accountability works equally well for corporations, academia, nonprofits, churches, and government organizations.

Matthew Luhn's book The Best Story Wins provides fresh perspectives on the principles of Pixar-style storytelling, adapted by one of the studio’s top creatives to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, marketers, and business-minded storytellers of all stripes. Pixar movies have transfixed viewers around the world and stirred a hunger in creative and corporate realms to adopt new and more impactful ways of telling stories. Former Pixar and The Simpsons Animator and Story Artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. A combination of Luhn’s personal stories and storytelling insights, The Best Story Wins retells the “Hero’s Journey” story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves!

David Gelles's book The Man Who Broke Capitalism covers the story of when Jack Welch took over General Electric and quickly rose to fame as the first celebrity CEO. He golfed with presidents, mingled with movie stars, and was idolized for growing GE into the most valuable company in the world. But Welch’s achievements didn’t stem from some greater intelligence or business prowess. Rather, they were the result of a sustained effort to push GE’s stock price ever higher, often at the expense of workers, consumers, and innovation. In this captivating, revelatory book, David Gelles argues that Welch single-handedly ushered in a new, cutthroat era of American capitalism that continues to this day.

Gelles shows how Welch’s celebrated emphasis on increasing shareholder value by any means necessary became the norm in American business generally. He demonstrates how that approach has led to the greatest socioeconomic inequality since the Great Depression and harmed many of the very companies that have embraced it. And he shows how a generation of Welch acolytes radically transformed companies like Boeing, Home Depot, Kraft Heinz, and more. Finally, Gelles chronicles the change that is now afoot in corporate America, highlighting companies and leaders who have abandoned Welchism and are proving that it is still possible to excel in the business world without destroying livelihoods, gutting communities, and spurning regulation. 

Managing the Unexpected, Third Edition is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe's revised books reflects events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change. High-reliability organizations (HROs), including commercial aviation, emergency rooms, aircraft carrier flight operations, and firefighting units, are looked to as models of exceptional organizational preparedness. This essential text explains the development of unexpected events and guides you in improving your organization for more reliable performance.

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs #1 New York Times Bestseller! Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.

The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention

In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic. 

Greg McKeown is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. He has taught at companies that include Apple, Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Symantec, Twitter and VMware. 

Essentialism is more than a time-management strategy or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter.
 

By forcing us to apply more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy—instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.
 

Essentialism is not one more thing—it’s a whole new way of doing everything. It’s about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.