The Challenge:

You are running a project that is supposed to improve the organization to leap out in front of the competition, yet you have had little formal training on what that means. Project managers need lessons in how world class business runs to drive projects to make that happen.

Built to Last, Collins' first book and defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study:

The Toyota Way provides the reader with a basic knowledge of the Toyota management principles that are commonly known as the "standard" for lean manufacturing. The book is broken into three sections—an introduction to the Toyota Production System (TPS), the fourteen principles of TPS and a discussion on implementing the principles. It contains a variety of examples of TPS in Toyota as well as in organizations other than automobile manufacturing.

The first section of the book, six chapters, provides the reader with a history of the Toyota system and a background for the presentation of the "Fourteen Management Principles" (the primary objective of the book). These chapters are a high-level discussion of how Liker has grouped the principles and shows application of them in Toyota.

Projects build capabilities to met corporate goals. If you are a CEO, you need to make sure your employees and vendors know what those goals are and how they fit in to the plan. If you are a project manager, you need to know the bounds of you project. If you are anywhere in-between, you need to understand how all the pieces fit together and keep it all aligned.

Most organizations consist of multiple business and support units, each populated by highly trained, experienced executives. But often the efforts of individual units are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportunities, and diminished performance.

The Guns of August is a military history book describing the events of the first month of World War I. The focus of the book is to provide the history of World War I from the declaration of war through the start of the French offensive that stopped the German advance through France resulting in a stalemate for the subsequent four years. In addition, the book provides history on the plans, strategies, world events and international sentiments prior to and during the war.