A lot of management practices seem somehow oppressive and cultish. TPS reports, Six Sigma, Lean, Agile, and Scrum. I can't say much about those, but I really enjoyed a workshop on Kanban, and this book was in the bibliography.

Kanban is Japanese for signal ticket. The Imperial Palace Garden has a box of tickets equal to the maximum number of visitors, and if there are no tickets, you must wait for someone leaving the park to drop theirs in the entrance. In management practice, Kanban is a pull-system, where the effective throughput of an organization is estimated, and tasks are pulled from initialization to completion. A large whiteboard of tickets (or digital equivalent) serves to self-organize the workflow, identifying blockages, slacks, and bottlenecks, without hefty managerial overhead.

Anderson describes several near miraculous management turnarounds he saw as part of major tech companies (Microsoft, Sprint), and a smaller stock photo company he was part of. Kanban, when properly implemented, increased the speed by which tasks where accomplished, decreased errors, improved moral, and created resilience and constant quality improvement. Kanban, and management by pull and flow, feels counter-intuitive at first, but I can sense a deep elegance to their logical principles.

The problem with this book is, even after attending a Kanban workshop, and even inclined to be generous to the method, I'm not sure that I know enough to actually implement Kanban. Heck, I'm not even sure that I know enough to properly cargo-cult Kanban, aside from sticky notes on a whiteboard. I'm sure it's good management practice, I'm just not convinced this is the book to explain it.