For anyone involved in creating or running projects, I recommend Reforming Project Management.
The blog has tips on leading projects, running meetings and lean thinking.
Hal Macomber's comments encouraged me to read Lean Thinking by Womack and Jones.
Starting with the Toyota model, it is based on 5 principles:
"All businesses must define the "value" that they produce as the product
that best suits customer needs. The leaders must then identify and
clarify the "value stream," the nexus of actions to bring the product
through problems solving, information management, and physical
transformation tasks. Next, "lean enterprise" lines up suppliers with
this value stream. "Flow" traces the product across departments. "Pull"
then activates the flow as the business re-orients towards the pull of
the customer's needs. Finally, with the company reengineered towards
its core value in a flow process, the business re-orients towards
"perfection," rooting out all the remaining muda (Japanese for "waste") in the system."
What does all that mean in practice?
Womack and Jones say that the traditional "batch and queue" method of production is wasteful. By changing to continuous flow , labor productivity is increased, production throughput times are reduced, inventories are reduced, errors are reduced and time to market is reduced and customers get what they want.
Lean Thinkers practice "kaikaku" (radical improvement) as opposed to "kaizen" (continuous incremental improvement).
Worth reading.