I finished the second suggested reading from work. It was The Toyota Way by Jeffrey K. Liker. This is the second book I got from a former VP at work, after Scaling Lean & Agile Development.
It was a pretty good book. As advertised on the cover there are 14 Toyota Way principles. The author describes all fourteen. The author knows his stuff and demonstrates several of the Toyota principles in writing the book such as "go see", and "towering technical knowledge".
It comes in at around 300 pages. With 14 principles to cover in detail it was lot of ground to cover. The first 100 pages were pretty good. The next 150 or so dragged a bit and it seemed a bit repetitive and hard to follow all of these specific Japanese terms getting through all 14 principles. The author finishes pretty strong in the last 50 pages.
All in all it was a good book. For the first half or so I struggled a bit to see the linkage between automobile design and factory assembly, and software development. However on thinking about it some more I think I may finally be grasping what that executive may have been getting at when he commissioned a copy of these two books for his entire organization.
I'm starting to finally see the linkage between software development and physical manufacturing/assembly processes. There's a lot to be gained in software development by applying ideas from Toyota and modern manufacturing such as lean, low inventory, levelling, value streams, tracing and counting the number of "steps" from idea to production code in the field, one piece flow, finding and eliminating queuing and other waste.
I've got some more to say about it and I'm pulling some thoughts together and I'll have some more to post on it coming up.
