Who: The A Method for hiring is a well thought out, practical, validated approach to developing a robust people process focused on hiring top talent in a systematic, focused, and ultimately, long term success focused way. Smart and Street take the lessons learned from the largest research study of it’s kind at the time to help solve one of the never ending challenges of owning, operating, and managing an organization and that is finding, retaining, and developing top talent. I’ve shared this book with entrepreneur peers, managers I know, business owners I’ve consulted for, and many others I interact with that have faced the challenge of finding and retaining top talent. Sadly, I find many small to medium sized business have ad hoc and non-standard ways they approach searching for, interviewing, selecting, hiring, onboarding, and training new talent in their organizations. This costs a huge amount of time, productivity, and ultimately money, but results in dissatisfied managers, new hires, and existing employees. This book is highly readable and is practical in its methods. I recommend this book for leaders, managers, project managers, and HR professionals looking for a thorough and well researched method for hiring great people.
Training Within Industry: The Foundation of Lean
This book is in the Top 10 Books of Continuous Improvement but most Lean, Six Sigma, Theory of Constraints, Agile, or whatever other flavor you want to pick, even among Industrial & Systems Engineers, wouldn’t know it! This book is rich in the history of continuous improvement, job methods and training, and program development, but also delivers practical, clear, concise, and proven methods. Training Within Industry is a little known organization that grew after World War I but was essential to the Allie’s winning World War II. It’s fundamental purpose was to design training and continuous improvement methods to ramp up the US production capacity and throughput to deliver much needs armament and supplies to the war fighters. What they did was nothing short of amazing, on the order of the Manhattan Project in my opinion, as it set the trajectory of the US to become the sole powerhouse of manufacturing in the world for decades to come. They trained millions of workers, across every conceivable industry, to design better work processes, train people in them, and improve them but also build sustainable programs in their organizations to continue on. I recommend this book for every Industrial and Systems Engineer, Continuous Improvement Expert, Manufacturing and Operations Managers, and Trainers of all kinds. You won’t be disappointed.