Managing to Learn reveals the thinking underlying the A3 management process found at the heart of lean management and leadership.

A3 Getting Started Guide includes some of our favorite tools, tips, and questions that illustrate the tool’s underlying learning process.

Managing on Purpose introduces the hoshin kanri methodology – a proven system for aligning strategy with execution, enabling sustainable results across the organization.

Daily Management to Execute Strategy is your essential guide to aligning daily operations with strategic goals.

Work of Management is a practical, in-depth, business case study of Lantech’s lean transformation, relapse, and comeback that American manufacturing – and other industries — can use to profitably transform themselves.

*These books are provided to participants in the Lean Management Program remote course

If so, Managing on Purpose introduces the hoshin kanri methodology—a proven system for aligning strategy with execution, enabling sustainable results across the organization. This approach has helped industry-leading organizations such as Toyota, Turner Construction, GE Appliances, and many others achieve breakthrough performance while fostering innovation and developing leadership capabilities.

Drawing from over two decades at Toyota and years coaching leaders in diverse industries, author Mark Reich provides step-by-step guidance on using hoshin kanri to focus on critical business challenges, deliver tangible results, and build long-term competitiveness. Through the detailed TrueMowers case study, readers will experience how this methodology drives real-world performance improvements.

Why This Book?

Organizations often struggle with three key challenges:

1. Setting realistic strategies that align with internal and external realities.
2. Translating those strategies into actionable and executable plans.
3. Adjusting effectively when plans encounter unforeseen obstacles.

Managing on Purpose demonstrates how hoshin kanri bridges these gaps, emphasizing results-driven transformation. Leaders who have implemented hoshin kanri have seen transformative outcomes:

• “When you compare 2019 to fiscal year 2024, we put seven points into gross margin,” says the CEO of Grand Rapids Chair. “As an MBA and an engineer, I’ve studied a lot of organizations, and seeing a seven-point improvement in gross margin is almost unheard of.”
• Executives at Turner Construction in New York credit hoshin kanri with improving their safety performance in New York City by over 80%, a critical success in one of the most challenging construction environments in the world.

These results show how hoshin kanri directly drives success, ensuring your strategy doesn’t just stay on paper but delivers impactful outcomes.

What You’ll Learn

• Develop Strategic Objectives: Annually define objectives that support your organization’s long-term vision and communicate those goals in ways that align across functions and levels of the organization.
• Engage Teams: Foster top-down and bottom-up collaboration and break down departmental silos to ensure everyone contributes to and supports shared objectives.
• Adapt with Agility: Build systems for ongoing review, learning, and adjustment when plans meet real-world challenges.
• Grow Leadership Capabilities: Use hoshin kanri not just to achieve results but to develop your leaders and build a culture of innovation.

Who Should Read This Book?

• Executives: Develop and manage a strategy that delivers real business impact.
• Managers: Bridge the gap between strategy and day-to-day execution.
• Lean Practitioners: Enable your company’s strategic transformation.

Whether you’re in manufacturing, healthcare, technology, or any other industry, Managing on Purpose will equip you with the tools and insights to transform your organization.

Key Features

• Real-World Case Study: Follow TrueMowers, a company in crisis, as it uses hoshin kanri to navigate market challenges, develop leadership, and achieve breakthrough results.
• Practical Tools and Techniques: Receive step-by-step guidance on using hoshin kanri, including templates and timelines.
• Insights from Toyota and industry-leading companies: Read real-world applications of hoshin kanri and how it enabled transformative performance.

Related Titles

The following titles complement Managing on Purpose, providing a comprehensive guide to building a complete lean management system—from hoshin kanri to daily management and problem-solving.

• Managing to Learn
  Gain a deep understanding of A3 problem-solving, a critical tool for aligning teams and solving problems effectively.
• Daily Management to Execute Strategy
  Discover how to establish daily management systems that ensure stable, sustainable operations as strategies are executed. This book complements Managing on Purpose by focusing on the operational discipline needed to sustain the results of hoshin kanri and achieve organizational goals.

Together, these books provide a roadmap for developing a robust lean management system that integrates strategic planning, daily execution, and problem-solving to achieve sustainable success.

Template Downloads

• Basic A3
• Corporate Hoshin
• Corporate Hoshin and Midyear Reflection
• Corporate Reflection
• Decision-Making Analysis
• Department Request Matrix
• Function Reflection
• Horizontal Consensus Matrix
• Hoshin Countermeasure Form
• Hoshin Evaluation
• Hoshin Kanri Long-Term Failure Modes
• Hoshin Project Plan
• Hoshin Summary Scorecard
• Input Prioritization Worksheet
• Proposal A3
• Strategy A3
• Three-Year Corporate Vision

 Through clear explanations, real-world case studies, and actionable advice, this book equips you with the practical skills to:  

• Align Daily Operations with Strategic Goals: Ensure your team’s daily activities consistently drive toward your organization’s long-term objectives.  

• Monitor Key Performance Indicators: Learn how to set and track control variables that keep your processes stable and your team focused.  

• Construct Effective Daily Management Boards: Build and implement daily management boards for both operational-level and managerial-level processes, making your strategy visible and actionable at every level of the organization.  

• Run Effective Daily Meetings: Master the art of leading daily stand-ups and other meetings that keep your team aligned, engaged, and ready to tackle challenges.  

• Build a Help Chain for Problem Escalation: Create a help chain that empowers your team to escalate issues effectively, fostering collaboration and teamwork instead of reactive firefighting.  

• Solve Problems Quickly and Effectively: Develop a problem-solving mindset within your team, allowing you to address issues before they become critical obstacles.  

Whether you are new to lean management or a seasoned practitioner looking to refine your current practices, Daily Management to Execute Strategy offers the insights and tools you need to create a culture of continuous improvement where every team member is engaged in solving problems and delivering value. Perfect for leaders, managers, and anyone committed to operational excellence, this book will empower you to turn strategy into action every day. 

Chapter Downloads:

• Table of Contents, Foreward, and Part 1
• Operational-level daily management assessment
• Daily management case study

“Daily Management to Execute Strategy provides an inside look into the secret sauce of a successful lean transformation. A lean system requires more than just implementing tools. The authors demonstrate how developing people to solve problems that matter can help any organization achieve its goals.”

– Rich Calvaruso, Senior Director, Lean, GE Appliances, a Haier Company

Given today’s challenging business climate, with myriad complex problems to solve, we were inspired to provide you with this A3 Getting Started Guide to help you utilize this powerful technique to cut through the noise and make a positive impact for your customers and the business.

Although this guide isn’t the end-all-be-all for how to use the A3 process, it includes some of our favorite tools, tips, and questions that illustrate the tool’s underlying learning process. We hope it gives you enough to get started and become an A3-thinking problem solver.

A3 Getting Started Guide Measures 3 inches tall by 5 inches wide. Comes with a 1 inch silver metal keychain ring. Contains 35 pages.

The book details a case study from a manufacturing standpoint, starting with a tangible example to reinforce the 6CON model. This is the first book written from this viewpoint—connecting a realistic transformation with the detailed technical challenges, as well as the engagement of the stakeholders, each with their own bias. Key points and must-do actions are sprinkled throughout the case study to reinforce learning from the specific to the general. In this study, an empowered working team is charged with developing a new production line for a critical new product. As the story unfolds, they create an improved process that saves $5.6 million (10x payback on upfront resource investment) over the short life cycle of the product, as well as other measurable benefits in quality, ergonomics, and delivery. To an even greater benefit, they establish a new way of working that can be applied to all future process creation activities.

Some organizations have tried their version of Lean process design following a formula or cookie-cutter approach. But true Lean process design goes well beyond forcing concepts and slogans into every situation. It is purposeful, scientific, and adaptable because every situation starts with a unique current state. In addition, Lean process design must include both the technical and social aspects, as they are essential to sustaining and improving any system.

Observing the recurring problem of reworking processes that were newly launched brought the authors to the conclusion that a practical book focused on introducing the critical frames of Lean process creation was needed. This book enables readers to consider the details within each frame that must be addressed to create a Lean process. No slogans, no absolutes. Real thinking is required. This type of thinking is best learned from an example, so the authors provide this case study to demonstrate the thinking that should be applied to any process. High volume or low, simple or complex mix, manufacturing or service/transactional—the framing and thinking works. Along with the thinking, readers are enabled to derive their own future states. This is demonstrated in the story that surrounds the case study.

The Gold Mine deftly weaves together the technical and human pieces of implementing lean manufacturing in an engaging story that readers will find both compelling and instructive. Authors Freddy and Michael Ballé have produced the first integrated and systematic approach to a set of ideas that have maximized value and minimized waste throughout the world.

At the heart of The Gold Mine is Bob Woods, a curmudgeonly sensei coaxed out of retirement by his son Mike to help boyhood friend Phil Jenkinson save his struggling company. Despite terrific products and a backlog of orders, Phil’s company cannot generate enough cash from its operations to pay its bills. And so Mike enlists Bob to help his pal fix this crisis.

The Gold Mine presents all the key lean principles, ranging from well-known ideas such as pull and flow, to lesser-known yet equally important principles such as jidoka and heijunka. The book presents lean as a system—using a realistic story to show how the principles are interrelated and how they lead to useful tools such as kanban or 5S. Freddy Ballé draws from his authority of one of Europe’s preeminent lean veterans, bringing his knowledge to life in the context of a dramatic human story of managers and employees struggling to apply these tools and ideas in a successful turnaround.

“Mastery of the technical details of lean thinking is never enough. A transformation will fail without the most important element: the engagement of the people doing the work,” says publisher James Womack. “The Gold Mine is the first book to comprehensively introduce all the lean tools by means of a vivid personal story showing how hearts and minds are won over. I can’t recommend it highly enough as a way to teach your people the key lean tools that always lead to success while also teaching, in the words of Bob Woods, that ‘it’s all about people.”

“Reading The Gold Mine is like eavesdropping on a sensei dispensing gems to a client,” says co-publisher Daniel Jones. “The Ballés draw from a remarkable perspective of wisdom and experience. Readers, especially those individuals working on the shop floor, will gain revelation and inspiration by living through the experiences of the hero. Managers and executives just beginning a lean transformation will learn valuable insights about how to sidestep the technical and people problems that lay ahead. And experienced lean thinkers will discover fresh insights about overcoming resistance to change.”

In this book, author Nate Furuta, former chair and CEO of Toyota Boshoku America Inc., shares the story of his decades of experience directly leading the establishment of Toyota cultures outside Japan. Furuta was the first Toyota employee on the ground at New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), Toyota’s joint venture in California with General Motors, where he directly led the establishment of the most revolutionary labor-management agreement in the history of the US auto industry. In addition, Furuta was the first Toyota employee on the ground in Georgetown Kentucky at Toyota’s first full-scale, wholly owned manufacturing operation outside Japan, where he led (working directly with President Fujio Cho) the establishment of Toyota’s general management systems and culture there.

This book tells the stories of establishing successful operations in those two iconic organizations as well as others. Furuta reveals details, both stories and process descriptions that only he can tell. He takes you along as he and others lead Toyota’s intense globalization from the early 1980s to recent days. He introduces you to the critical leaders in Toyota’s history, such as Taiichi Ohno and Fujio Cho as well as Kenzo Tamai, the head of the company’s HRM function in the 1980s.

This book is not about human-resource management (HRM) policies and procedures. It provides a deep dive into the way senior leaders embody deep awareness of HRM matters, developing and executing company strategy while at the same time developing organizational capability. The role of senior leaders isn’t just a matter of directing the company to achieve objectives; it is a matter of building the capability to achieve those objectives, consistently, and further developing capability as it executes. Key to this is to develop the awareness, attitude, capability, and practice of identifying problems as progress is made toward achieving objectives, which is, in fact, attained through steadily eliminating each problem as it arises. This becomes a self-reinforcing loop of the organization, tapping in to the essence of solving problems while simultaneously developing ever better problem-solving skills and better problem solvers. This loop propels an organization toward meeting its purpose while developing capability for capability development.

Essentially, this book reveals Toyota’s general management systems from the firsthand experience of a Toyota Japanese senior manager and describes, with stories and process examples, the attitude, behaviors, and systems needed to successfully establish and lead in a true Lean business environment.

In Japanese, “dantotsu” means “extreme,” “radical,” or “unparalleled.” In this book, Toyota veteran Sadao Nomura shares his decades of experience leading and supporting Toyota operations and tells the story of the dramatic improvement he and his team achieved at Toyota Logistics & Forklift (TL&F).  

Although TL&F seemed to be performing well, insiders knew that, as the founding company of the Toyota group, it needed to do better, especially in the quality performance of its global subsidiary operations. But improvement would not be easy in a company that already prided itself in its history as an exemplar in providing highest quality products and services. In 2006, TL&F requested assistance from Sadao Nomura. The initial request was for Mr. Nomura to support quality improvement in three global operations that had become part of TL&F through acquisition: US, Sweden, and France. Improvement was expected at these affiliates, but the radical nature of the improvement was not. In fact, the improvement activities were so powerful that they were also adopted at the parent operations in Japan. Over a period of almost ten years, the company with the name most associated with product quality experienced quality improvement unparalleled in its history. 

According to John Shook and Toshiko Narusawa, who wrote the Introduction to the book, TL&F represents the “ground zero for the most important advances in quality improvement since the Deming-inspired quality improvements of the post-WWII Japanese economic miracle”. With the aid of powerful visuals, this book offers a detailed account of what Nomura-san did there – an approach that is entirely replicable by any manufacturer. Follow the steps laid out in it and you, too, will be able to bring radical improvement to your organization. After all, if the best can get (extremely) better, so can we!