2020 Axiom Business Book Awards Bronze Medal Winner Lean organisations seem to work in a simple manner and operate with an innate calmness. They have removed much of the complexity that inhibits the performance of other companies, but achieving this level of simplicity is not easy. In The Simplicity of Lean, Philip Holt provides a comprehensive handbook of the Lean principles, presented in an accessible and easy to apply manner. The Simplicity of Lean is a step-by-step guide to the Lean Thinking that makes your organisation more efficient and effective. The book offers the necessary context of how to apply Lean Thinking to make your Lean Transformation successful. Alongside the theory and the practical application of Lean, Philip also shares his personal insights and experiences, as well as individual success stories (and failures) from various Lean leaders from across the world. The Simplicity of Lean is the perfect guide to make your Lean journey a resounding success. Philip Holt is Senior Vice President, Global Transformation, at GKN Aerospace and a Board Member of the Operational Excellence Society. He studied Engineering at Manchester Metropolitan University and Management at the Wharton School of Pennsylvania and the University of Warwick, was an engineer at Gillette and led the Lean Deployment worldwide at Philips for over twelve years. He achieved Lean Master status and has summarised his 30+ years of experience and insights into Lean Leadership in his previous book Leading with Lean and his most recent book, The Simplicity of Lean.

Every lean practitioner occasionally wishes for a simple, fun, and quick-read introduction to lean thinking to give acquaintances, associates, and family members -- even to our kids. If lean thinking often entails unlearning a plethora of bad habits, wouldn't it better if we learned better thinking -- and habits -- from the beginning? Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade is just that sort of book. It brings lean back to its original simplicity by showing how lean is alive in a first grade classroom. The book connects common lean tools to the broader lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the reader in seeing lean for what it truly is: a way to create a learning and problem- solving culture. Written to educate the entire organization on the fundamentals of lean thinking, this is the perfect source to engage all team members at all levels of an organization. Originally self-published in 2008, LEI is proud to re-issue this book and make it available to the broader lean community.

Philip Holt is Head of Operational Excellence, Accounting Operations at Philips, and tells us exactly what Lean Leadership is, how we can learn to apply it and how you can convince the workplace never to settle for anything less than excellence. We also learn how to redefine our leadership style and how to identify and eliminate wasteful activities within the company. This way you can recognize, realize and retain the ideal situation. In Leading with Lean, Philip Holt shows us the best ways to arrange a high-performance organization and gives us simple tools and insights for each leader to aspire to greatness, for themselves and for their teams.

Leaders are now recognizing that product design is the primary driver of success. They are making it their primary target in their quest for delivering customers more value at less cost. Now Bart Huthwaite, founder of the Institute for Lean Design and recognized as America's Lean Design Coach, show you how, step-by-step, to create lean products and services right from the start. He reveals success secrets and a road map for integrating lean design with six sigma design for powerful results

User experience (UX) design has traditionally been a deliverables-based practice, with wireframes, site maps, flow diagrams, and mockups. But in today’s web-driven reality, orchestrating the entire design from the get-go no longer works. This hands-on book demonstrates Lean UX, a deeply collaborative and cross-functional process that lets you strip away heavy deliverables in favor of building shared understanding with the rest of the product team. Lean UX is the evolution of product design; refined through the real-world experiences of companies large and small, these practices and principles help you maintain daily, continuous engagement with your teammates, rather than work in isolation. This book shows you how to use Lean UX on your own projects. Get a tactical understanding of Lean UX—and how it changes the way teams work together Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomes Bring the designer’s tool kit to the rest of your product team Break down the silos created by job titles and learn to trust your teammates Improve the quality and productivity of your teams, and focus on validated experiences as opposed to deliverables/documents Learn how Lean UX integrates with Agile UX

The parameters of competition in business today are changing -- big does not necessarily beat small anymore; fast is beating slow. Agility, speed, and flexibility are the key elements of a successful strategy and execution in the corporate world as wells as in government agencies, health care, and education.. How well will your firm execute its strategy? What barriers exist that inhibit your execution? Are you keeping one eye on tomorrow’s customers, while you manage those of today? These are all key questions as we strive to deliver value on an ongoing basis. Simple: Killing Complexity for a Lean and Agile Organization is about agility and simplicity, in which achieving simplicity comes from a focus on the customer. Agility begins with planning, and leadership teams must develop decent vision. Generally, leaders know what they want to do, but many organizations break down, however, I when trying to implement the action plan. With over 25 years of industry, teaching, and consulting experience, the author illustrates how organizations can: Recognize who their true customers are, and appreciate what those customers want Begin to eliminate the products, services, processes and ‘work’ that gets in the way of delivering value to those customers Focus people and processes towards value creation, even in what are perceived as non-customer centric operations Avoid brand confusion and the ‘all things to all people’ mentality The complexities of managing in today’s world both obscures decision making and layers on challenges that bog an organization down, preventing leadership from understanding what their customers want. By understanding who those customers are, and what they want, leaders can focus innovation strategy and projects in ways that deliver sustainable value. Even in not-for-profit and government agencies, executing in an aligned organization can become the profitable standard business process.

Ten laws of simplicity for business, technology, and design that teach us how to need less but get more. Finally, we are learning that simplicity equals sanity. We're rebelling against technology that's too complicated, DVD players with too many menus, and software accompanied by 75-megabyte "read me" manuals. The iPod's clean gadgetry has made simplicity hip. But sometimes we find ourselves caught up in the simplicity paradox: we want something that's simple and easy to use, but also does all the complex things we might ever want it to do. In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design—guidelines for needing less and actually getting more. Maeda—a professor in MIT's Media Lab and a world-renowned graphic designer—explores the question of how we can redefine the notion of "improved" so that it doesn't always mean something more, something added on. Maeda's first law of simplicity is "Reduce." It's not necessarily beneficial to add technology features just because we can. And the features that we do have must be organized (Law 2) in a sensible hierarchy so users aren't distracted by features and functions they don't need. But simplicity is not less just for the sake of less. Skip ahead to Law 9: "Failure: Accept the fact that some things can never be made simple." Maeda's concise guide to simplicity in the digital age shows us how this idea can be a cornerstone of organizations and their products—how it can drive both business and technology. We can learn to simplify without sacrificing comfort and meaning, and we can achieve the balance described in Law 10. This law, which Maeda calls "The One," tells us: "Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful."