The Leaders Handbook, from Peter Scholtes is a management classic. Scholtes describes what leadership should be like in the 21^st century: inspiring people to continuously improve the processes in which they work. For me personally, this book describes the link between lean production and what Peter Senge (1990) describes as systems thinking

The 400 pages of this book are so full of content, that it is impossible to capture the essence within 1000 words. Therefore, this article describes the three parts that interested me the most: 6 new leadership competencies, the 7 steps of breakthrough improvement and the 8 steps of designing a data collection system to guide improvements.

In Making materials flow, Rick Harris, Chris Harris and Earl Wilson describe the topic of Material replenishment. In complex production processes, focusing on how each U-cell or production line is fed with material is just as interesting as the flow of the product through these cells.

The authors describe a four step plan to implement the most efficient material replenishment system: create a plan for every part (PFEP), install a market of purchased parts, design delivery routes and continuously improve & sustain the system.

In his book Talk like TED, Carmine Gallo describes the success formula behind the famous TED talks. With 1.5 million viewers per day, TED is one of the most visited websites worldwide, which makes it an honor to be invited to talk at TED.

What is it that makes TED talks so interesting? What makes some video´s so great, that they are watched over 18 million times? Gallo dived into this topic and describes 9 secrets of presenting for an audience.

High Five! Is the third book by Blanchard and Bowles on team work. In this novel, main character Alan is fired from his job because he is not a team player, but immediately gets the chance to coach an ice hockey team on the same topic. Now that Alan has the opportunity to learn himself about team work, he searches advice from an old lady, and star in coaching, Miss Weatherby.

Weatherby teaches Alan, his fellow coaches and the boys of the ice hockey team the four keys of team success: purpose and values (1), developing skills (2), creating team power (3) and focusing on the positive (4).

This article describes a team and teamwork in general, and addresses all of the four secrets of High Five! shortly.

In their little book One Minute Manager, Blanchard & Johnson describe three secrets of successful leadership: one minute goals, one minute praising and one minute reprimands. According to the authors, the best managers are the ones who can combine these three topics, all within a view minutes, to coach their team members.

The book itself is very short, which makes this summary even shorter. In this article, all three secrets are described in more detail.

In this article, Tracey and Ernie Richardson describe the purspose of Gemba walks: developing people.
They describe:

• a number of questions to ask before, during, and after the gemba walk,
• How to reflect on the gemba walk
• things to avoid when on a gemba walk

In his book, the five levels of Leadership, John Maxwell describes 5 levels of leadership maturity. From leadership based on position (level 1) to being a leader by developing other leaders (level 5), Maxwell explains why every organization needs more level 5 leaders and how every individual can get there. Of course, this fantastic book is accompanied by lots of one liners, and insights from Maxwell’s personal experience.

For each leadership level, the book describes how to recognize this type of leader and what you can do to grow to the next level of leadership. Interesting to note beforehand is, that the levels on which you act can differ per person you work with. You can be a level 3 leaders with one colleague, and a level 4 with another.

The A3 is a tool that is used within Toyota as management tool (Shook, 2008). This tool is an actual A3 paper, which is used by managers to coach their team members while they are solving problems (Rother, 2010). This means that, where traditional managers will hand out tasks and only care about the results, the lean manager would like to hear how his mentee came to that solution. This article will describe what the A3 is, and three contexts in which it can be used: daily coaching, as part of the different forms of improvement activities and within the strategic catch-ball process.

​We will learn that using the A3 is not about the form itself, but a tool to facilitate some sort of standardize storytelling, which is used to communicate facts and meaning in a common understood format (Shook, 2008).

In Bringing out the best in people, Aubrey Daniels describes the power and simplicity of positive reinforcement. First, he describes the ABC theory (Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence), which forms the basis for his change management theory. Positive reinforcement has everything to do with the consequences for the individual after he showed the behavior that we would like to see. To be able to change behavior, Daniels writes, we need to predefine both the behavior we would want to see in our organization as well as the consequences for showing them.